bloody

May 30, 2020

31 May 2020

FREDDY [opening the door for her] Are you walking across the Park, Miss Doolittle? If so—
LIZA. Walk! Not bloody likely. [Sensation]. I am going in a taxi. [She goes out].
Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to catch another glimpse of Eliza.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [suffering from shock] Well, I really cant get used to the new ways.
CLARA [throwing herself discontentedly into the Elizabethan chair]. Oh, it’s all right, mamma, quite right. People will think we never go anywhere or see anybody if you are so old-fashioned.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I daresay I am very old-fashioned; but I do hope you wont begin using that expression, Clara. I have got accustomed to hear you talking about men as rotters, and calling everything filthy and beastly; though I do think it horrible and unladylike. But this last is really too much. Dont you think so, Colonel Pickering?
PICKERING. Dont ask me. Ive been away in India for several years; and manners have changed so much that I sometimes don't know whether I’m at a respectable dinner-table or in a ship's forecastle.
CLARA. It's all a matter of habit. Theres no right or wrong in it. Nobody means anything by it. And its so quaint, and gives such a smart emphasis to things that are not in themselves very witty. I find the new small talk delightful and quite innocent.
—George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, Act 3, 1914

Bloody is commonly used in colloquial speech and writing as an intensifier throughout the English-speaking world, with the notable exception of North America. Once considered highly offensive, like most swear words it has ameliorated over the course of the last century and become less so, although it still isn’t considered to be polite speech in most places. The process of amelioration got its start in Australia, and there it has come the farthest in terms of acceptability.

This amelioration can be seen to be happening in the above scene from Pygmalion and the various characters’ reactions to Eliza Doolittle’s use of the word. It shows class differences in that working-class Eliza uses bloody without a thought, while it shocks and surprises her upper-middle-class companions. It shows generational differences in that young Clara finds the word exciting, while her mother objects to it. And Colonel Pickering, inured by long exposure to the language of soldiers and sailors, isn’t sure what is considered polite language and what isn’t. This scene created a sensation upon the play’s London opening in 1914, so much so that people began using the phrase Pygmalion expression / talk / word as a euphemism for bloody. And not just in the years immediately following; the Oxford English Dictionary includes a 2002 citation of Pygmalion word substituting for bloody.

The origin of this intensifying use of bloody is most likely the result of a standard linguistic process known as semantic bleaching. Over time, the literal meaning of the word or phrase is “bleached” away, leaving behind only a marker for how the words around it should be interpreted. A similar example of semantic bleaching is awesome. It originally meant awe-inspiring, but over the centuries that meaning faded, and it has come to simply designate something good.

Bloody is, obviously, derived from the root blood + -y, a suffix used to mean having the qualities of, full of. And indeed, it originally meant, and can still mean, literally covered in blood. And by extension it is used to refer to killing, the spilling of blood, and general cruelty. The word goes back to Old English, and can, among many other texts, be found in Beowulf. Here in lines 987b–990 it is used to describe the man-eating monster Grendel, who cannot be harmed by weapons:

Æghwylc gecwæð
þæt him heardra nan         hrinan wolde
iren ærgod         þæt ðæs ahlæcan
blodge beadu-folme         onberan wolde.
(Everyone said that no venerable iron possessed by hard men would strike him so as to harm the opponent’s bloody battle-hand.)

One of the earliest uses of bloody as an intensifier is from Scotland c. 1548 in the testimony of an Abraham Creichtoun for slandering an Isobelle Keringtoun, recorded in the Liber Officialis Sancti Andree:

I grant heir befoir þer honest personis þat I have fairely and wranguiflie jniurit and difamyt gow sayand and allegand gow ane commown bluidy huir and þat ye had lyin by your husband wytht vþeris diuers jniurious wordis quhilkis wer nocht of verite.
(I grant here before these honest persons that I have openly and wrongfully injured and defamed you with other diverse, injurious words which were not true, saying and alleging you are a common, bloody whore and that you had lied to your husband.)

Over the centuries, various metaphors have been put forward to explain why bloody is used as an intensifier and why it has been considered so offensive. None of the them have good evidential support, and semantic bleaching remains the most likely reason. Among these various suggestions for the development of this sense that fall short of the mark are that bloody:

Comes from oaths like Christ’s blood! or God’s blood!, but none of these oaths are recorded as intensifiers and functional shifts from interjection to intensifier are rare
Is a euphemistic form of by our Lady or byrlady, but the same problems with interjections as intensifiers apply
Is a reference to menstruation, but there is no textual evidence to support this
Is a reference to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but early uses of bloody are not especially found in religious or anti-Catholic contexts
Refers to noble blood and the revelry and drinking habits of aristocrats, but again no textual evidence supports this contention, and the phrase drunk as a Lord, which is advanced to support it, is a later development.

In short, the semantic bleaching hypothesis remains the best explanation for the word’s use as an intensifier. This explanation may be prosaic and less interesting to some, but then it is a usual process by which language develops, and that is, in a way, more interesting than the more far-fetched explanations.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bloody adj., bloody adv.

Liber Officialis Sancti Andree. Edinburgh: 1845, 139.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. Pygmalion, n., adj., and adv.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. bloody, adj., n, and adv.

Shaw, Bernard. Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts. Rough proof—unpublished, London: Constable and Company, 1914, 49–50.

fish or cut bait

May 30, 2020

31 May 2020

When many people tell someone to fish or cut bait, they mean that the person should either get the job done or quit. They assume that cutting bait refers to cutting the fishing line and abandoning the bait to the waters. But that is not what the metaphor underlying the phrase means. To cut bait is to prepare the bait, specifically to chop it up into pieces, an unpleasant, but necessary, job. So, the underlying metaphor of the phrase means to take either a lead or a secondary role, but in either case, get to work. The misunderstanding undoubtedly arose because people who had never been fishing began using the phrase.

A literal use of fish or cut bait appears in the New York Daily Tribune of 8 August 1844, in an article that makes the point that the fishermen and hunters out in Suffolk County on Long Island are every bit as good as sophisticated Manhattanites:

Our friends who look down to Fire Island and about assure us that cleverer fellows to fish or cut bait, bag game or even shoot it (when you want the reputation of a sportsman and have to do it on borrowed capital) can’t be found any where.

And the earliest figurative uses of the phrase give three alternative actions, not just two: fish, cut bait, or go ashore, making it akin to phrase I learned in the Army: lead, follow, or get out of the way. This three-pronged phrase appears in the Detroit Free Press of 10 June 1848 in the context of Zachary Taylor receiving the Whig party’s nomination for president. The abolitionist wing of that party was upset that Taylor, a slave owner, got the party’s nod:

Here we have been for the last six months abusing the war—the officers, and soldiers and above all manifesting our sympathy for the slaves and just as we had got ready to hurrah! over goes our dish by the nomination of one of the greatest slave holders in christendom. ‘Othelo’s occupation is gone’ and we have either got to “cut bait, fish or go ashore.”

Over the next few years, the abolitionists among the Whigs would end up “going ashore” and joining the newly formed Republican party.

Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, igniting the U.S. Civil War. And he is reported by multiple sources to have used the three-pronged phrase in July 1862 in a meeting with congressmen from the so-called Border States, those slave states that had remained in the Union. The Independent of 17 July 1862 reports on it thusly:

The President on Saturday last invited the Border-state congressmen to a conference, in which he endeavored to induce them to adopt his policy of gradual emancipation. [...] Mr. Lincoln is said to have told the Border-state men that “they must either fish, cut bait, or go ashore!”

The same Lincoln story and quote is relayed by the Pittsburgh Gazette on 21 July 1862 and is reported in Britain by The Scotsman of 29 July 1862.

The shortened, two-prong version of the phrase is in place a few years later. From the Pittsburgh Daily Post of 15 August 1866:

The Washington correspondent of the radically pious and piously radical sheet, the New York Independent, is determined to make Stanton fish, or cut bait. In speaking of the New Orleans riot he says: “Mr. Stanton, who was so bold during the war, is trembling with fear and remorse in the shadow of his office.”

And the New York Times of 11 July 1868 has nice use and explanation of the metaphor:

The Committee had done the bidding of Tammany Hall long enough, and it was time they had a mind of their own. Ex-Councilman MERRITT was in favor of indorsing the nomination: they must either fish or cut bait, and as they were not large enough to fish they must be content to cut bait for Tammany.

This history does not, however, necessarily mean that people today are using the phrase incorrectly. Usage, not etymology, governs what a word or phrase means. If people use and understand fish or cut bait to mean do the job or get out of the way, then that is what the phrase means. But such a usage is not what the phrase originally meant.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“America.” The Scotsman, 29 July 1862, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“American Nero.” Daily Post (Pittsburgh), 15 August 1866, 2. ProQuest.

“CONGRESS: Debate on the Bill to Call Out Militia.” The Independent, 17 July 1862, 8. ProQuest.

“Constitutional Union General Committee.” New York Times, 11 July 1868, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. fish v.1.

“Notes from the Capital.” Pittsburgh Gazette, 21 July 1862, 3. ProQuest.

“Thanks.” Detroit Free Press, 10 June 1848, 2. ProQuest.

“A Voice from Old Suffolk!” New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1844, 2. ProQuest.

Photo credit: Lake Michigan Angler, 2009,

charley horse

May 29, 2020

29 May 2020

A charley horse is a sudden cramp in the leg, a common affliction among athletes. The term arose in baseball in the late nineteenth century, we know that much for certain, but as to who Charley was or why he had a horse, or if the phrase refers to a horse named Charley, no one has any good idea. The origin of the term in that regard is a mystery.

The earliest use of the term found to date is in a letter from Jim Hart, manager of the Louisville Colonels baseball team, published in that city’s Courier-Journal on 21 March 1886:

Ely is still suffering from a sore arm, and Reccius has what is known by ball players as “Charley Horse,” which is a lameness in the thigh, caused by straining the cord.

Another early appearance is in the same newspaper a few months later, on 14 July 1886:

Several years ago, says the Chicago Tribune, Joe Quest, now of the Athletics, gave the name of “Charlie horse” to a peculiar contraction and hardening of the muscles and tendons of the thigh, to which base ball players are especially liable from the sudden starting and stopping in chasing balls, as well as the frequent slides in base running. Pfeffer, Anson and Kelly are so badly troubled with “Charley horse” there are times they can scarcely walk. Gore had it so bad he had to lay off a few days, and is not entirely free from it now. Williamson, too, has had a touch of it.

(I have yet to find the Chicago Tribune story referenced here. Most likely it is from a few days earlier, and the Courier-Journal story may be a word-for-word reprint. Reprinting such stories verbatim was a common practice among newspapers of the day.)

Quest appears in many of early explanations for the term’s appearance, but whether or not he coined it is unknown. The only thing we can say with confidence is that he frequently used the term.

There are a number of old explanations for the term floating about, but either they have no evidence to support them, or they come too late to the be the origin of the term. The oldest of these dates to 1887, shortly after the term first appeared in print. From the Boston Herald, 12 July 1887:

For the benefit of many inquiring readers who have never had the considerable complaint, it may be said that “Charley horse” is a complaint caused by the straining of the cords in a ball player’s leg. The name is said to owe its origin to the fact that a player afflicted with it, when attempting to run, does so much after the fashion of a boy astride of a wooden horse, sometimes called a “Charley horse.”

Children’s hobby horses of the era were indeed often called Charlie horse or Charley horse, so it is a plausible explanation, but it is speculation with no solid evidence behind it. One might think that since the explanation appears shortly after the term’s appearance in print, but this does not add to its veracity—such early explanations are very often wrong. But the appearance of this explanation so soon after the first known appearance indicates that the term is probably older, as the general public was already becoming familiar with it.

H. L. Mencken, in his American Language, traced the term to Charlie “Duke” Esper who played for a number of teams in the 1890s. But as we have seen, the term predates Esper’s professional baseball career, so he cannot be the source of the term.

Another is that it comes from an old, lame horse named Charley that dragged and smoothed the infield for either the Chattanooga or Sioux City team (take your pick). The Chattanooga story is chronologically possible, but has no evidence to support it, and professional baseball wasn’t played in Sioux City until after the term had appeared, so that one is out.

Yet another explanation is that players on either the Chicago White Stockings or the Baltimore Orioles (again, take your pick) bet on a racehorse named Charley who came in last. Later that day, one of their players pulled a leg muscle, and he was dubbed “Charley Horse.” The Chicago version is said to have happened in 1886, so this story is probably too late, given the attestations from players in that same year that the term had been in use for some time. (Usually, and especially for slang, oral use of a term predates its appearance in the written record by some period, typically a few years.) As for the Baltimore version, that story is associated with John McGraw, who didn’t play until the 1890s.

The fact that versions of some of these tales pop up in multiple cities indicates that they were exchanged and retold multiple times. So, it seems likely that such stories arose because players in the 1890s were using the already existing term charley horse to rib and make fun of players (or horses) that were lame and that in the retelling of these baseball yarns and jokes the stories became the origin of the term in their minds.

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Sources:

“BASE BALL: A Letter from Manager Hart.” Louisville Courier-Journal, 21 March 1886, 10.

Dickson, Paul. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition, 2009, s.v. charley horse.

“From the Outfield,” Boston Herald, 12 July 1887, 5.

Popik, Barry. “Charley Horse (Charlie Horse).” The Big Apple, 22 February 2016. https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/charley_horse_charlie_horse/

Shulman, David. “Whence ‘Charley Horse.’” American Speech, 24.2, April 1949, 100–04.

“STILL SLUGGING. The Heavy Batting Record of the Louisville Club.” Louisville Courier-Journal, 14 July 1886, 6.

blockbuster

May 28, 2020

28 May 2020

To most of us today, a blockbuster is anything that is gigantic or enormously successful. It’s often used in relation to movies, television, and bestselling books. But the word originally referred to a World War II bomb, one big enough to destroy an entire city block.

The earliest instance of its use that I have found is in an Associated Press article from 25 July 1942:

The western air front meanwhile produced news of two-way attack, comparatively heavy German raids on Britain which cost the Nazis seven out of 40 bombers, and an assault by the RAF on Ruhr and Rhineland by forces several times as large as the German attacking unit. Again, the RAF dropped its two-ton “block buster” bombs, especially on Duisburg.

After this date, uses of blockbuster in reference to literal bombs are common during the war years. But metaphorical use of the term to refer to anything big quickly followed. A story in the Ladies’ Home Journal of November 1943 about the return home of Sgt. Harold Loch, gunner on the B-17 Memphis Belle, which had just completed 25 bombing missions over occupied Europe, uses the term in a crossover from bombing to figurative use when Loch does not arrive on the train as expected:

Only then did mom break down and sob on pop’s shoulder. Sadly they trooped home. The day was an emotional block buster for them all.

The bombing metaphor is also “dropped” in this Time magazine article from 12 June 1944, which describes U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s announcement of plans for a post-war United Nations:

Blockbuster. The President then quietly dropped his blockbuster. The U.S., he said, has an objective today to join other nations for the general world peace—but without taking away the integrity of the U.S. in any shape, manner or form.

And about a week after this Time magazine piece, we see a use of blockbuster without any obvious connection to bombs, but which crosses over into the world of entertainment. A 17 June 1944 letter to Billboard magazine quotes a circus side-show performer using the word to denote something that is literally large, to wit, herself:

Radio broadcasts were to the liking of our actors. They believed that they had reached their goal. Every freak, dancer, singer, musician and talker vied for the honor of going on the air. They created their own songs and patter. Cracked-voice front talkers became announcers and emcees. Remember it all started two years ago and the same broadcasts are still going on. The fat gal still yells: “I’m Baby Blockbuster. I weigh 700 pounds; am single and looking for a husband. How would you like to hold me on your knee?”

Shortly after the war, boxing takes up the word, using it refer to fists or punches which pack destructive power. There are many such uses in the late 1940s. Here is one of the early ones from 5 January 1946 by sportswriter Sid Feder:

Midway through that heat, Morris fired a left hook that practically sank out of sight in Jack’s midsection, and for half a minute the Georgia Negro slowed to a walk. Before the round was over, however, he was back in there with his blockbusters again, and it was obvious the party was just about over.

By the mid-1950s, Hollywood discovered the blockbuster film. There is this from Variety of 12 September 1956:

Aim is to convert the theatre eventually to a single picture policy. Initially the theatre will run on a solo pic basis whenever it books one of the so-called block buster films, such as “The Duchin Story” and “The King and I.” For entries it doesn’t regard as strong enough to stand alone, it will revert to the tandem setup, the hope being, however, to establish the house as a single feature situation.

And the next month, this piece titled “Hollywood’s Blockbusters” by Hollis Alpert appeared in the October 1956 issue of Women’s Day:

This is the season of the blockbuster movie. For the past year or more word has been seeping through about the preparation of four movies, each of which is to be the biggest, greatest, most awe-inspiring ever made. They are ready for release, and toeing the mark to challenge the box-office records set by Gone With the Wind, the most popular movie of all time. Two of these new movies, War and Peace and The Ten Commandments, will be at least as long as Gone With the Wind and should challenge the endurance of movie audiences, anyway. The other two, Giant and Around the World in 80 Days, are not quite so lengthy, running about three hours each, but nevertheless rank among the costliest and most lavish films ever made.

Also in the 1950s, another sense of blockbuster developed in the United States. This time it once again referred to literal city or suburban blocks, but what is destroyed are racially segregated neighborhoods. Blockbusting became the term used when a Black family moved into what had previously been an all-white neighborhood. Here is an example, a United Press story from 2 October 1955:

They deny that any responsible Negro groups organize or promote such movement. The movement into white neighborhoods is the result of the Negro’s desire for better housing and his increasing ability to pay for it, they say.
There are many areas where “block-busting” has taken place without difficulties. In other cities, disturbances have resulted.

While the first literal blockbusters were British bombs, the early metaphorical and slang uses that we have seen are American. But there is one early British metaphorical use cited by the OED. In this case, the metaphor underlying the use is a mystery to me. Perhaps someone with knowledge of the politics of Northern Ireland in the 1940s can enlighten me. W.R. Rodgers writing in the New Statesman and Nation of 20 November 1946:

Nor is the Labour Party in Northern Ireland likely to ignore a loyalty which faces it with one of its greatest problems, namely, how to hinge the interests of Protestant and Catholic, Loyalist and Nationalist, not merely on the economic, but also on the emotional plane. That task is not made easier by those English Labour M.P.s who in their speeches show only a blockbusting contempt for Ulster.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Alpert, Hollis. “Hollywood’s Blockbusters.” Women’s Day, October 1956, 80.

Associated Press. “Furious Rostov Battle Continues.” Albuquerque Journal, 25 July 1942, 2.

Feder, Sid. “Beau Jack KO’s Reif in Fourth.” Daily Press (Newport News, Virginia), 5 January 1946, 5.

“The Great Blueprint.” Time, 43.24, 12 June 1944.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. blockbuster n.1, blockbuster n.2, and blockbust, v.

“A Hero Comes Home.” Ladies’ Home Journal, 60.11, November 1943, 116.

Major Privilege. Letter, 17 June 1944. In “Ballyhoo Bros.’ Circulating Expo.” Billboard, 56.26, 24 June 1944, 34.

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

RKO Hatching Single Pic Artie Plot for N.Y. Nabe in “Gold Coast” Experiment.” Variety, 204.2, 12 September 1956, 5.

Rodgers, W.R. “Black North.” New Statesman and Nation, 26.665, 20 November 1946, 332.

United Press. “’Blocks Busted.’ Minority Housing Barriers Falling.” Detroit Free Press, 2 October 1955, 26.

Photo credit: Imperial War Museum.

blimp

May 27, 2020

27 May 2020

Growing up down the road from Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, home the U.S. Navy’s lighter-than-air program, I always had a fascination with blimps and dirigibles. Many of my friends’ parents worked on the Navy blimps, and some of their grandparents were on the ground when the Hindenburg exploded and crashed. And growing up, I had always thought I knew the origin of the word blimp, but I was wrong. There are many speculative origins that have been proposed, including the one I fell for when I was a boy, but the origin of the word is unknown. There is one plausible origin story that very well be correct, but we can’t be sure.

People have been riding in balloons since 1783, when the Mongolfier brothers took to air in one. But it was not until World War I that lighter-than-air craft really came into their own, and it was during that war that the term blimp was coined.

Even in the first recorded use of the term that we know of, the anonymous writer asks where the word comes from. From the Daily Mirror, 25 January 1916:

“Blimps”
I was amused to hear what the Air Service call the lighter-than-air machines, i.e., the airships and balloons. They call them “blimp,” “submarine searchers” and “babies.” But why “blimps,” I wonder.

The next extant use of the term is about two weeks later by naval officer Harold Rosher in a letter to his father on 11 February. Rosher was killed shortly afterward, and his letters were collected and published that September:

Visited the Blimps [small airships] this afternoon at Capel. They are really most interesting.

Note that when preparing the letter for publication, the editor added the definition in square brackets, apparently thinking the general public would be unfamiliar with the word.

Blimp is used by American writer Ralph Paine, writing about the British craft, in 1918. Again, the unfamiliarity of the word is called out in the publication, this time with quotation marks:

Two can play at the bombing game, and in the Dover Strait the English “blimps” take a hand at it, those small dirigibles which gleam high overhead like silvered sausages. They are useful on the submarine patrol when the weather is fair and clear, and during the summer days they cruise for a dozen hours at a stretch, drifting above the shipping lanes. Their mishaps are often entertaining, with a spice of humor, for their crews do not take the “blimps” too seriously.

But by 1919 the word had become familiar enough to be applied to large or overweight persons. The first such use that I’ve found is in a description of the upcoming Jack Dempsey–Jess Willard fight in July 1919. At 6’6.5” (1.99 m) tall and 235 lbs. (107 kg), Willard was the largest heavyweight champion in history and known as the Pottawatomie Giant. The day before the fight, on 3 July 1919, sportswriter Grantland Rice penned the following:

The populace at large believes that Dempsey at least has an even chance and so once more they are coming in the hope to see a living story, not of fiction, but of fact, where the small stranger overthrows the giant blimp.

Dempsey went on to crush Willard the next day, with the larger man retiring to his corner after the third round.

Two weeks later, humor columnist Arthur “Bugs” Baer would use blimp to describe an overweight golfer two weeks later in his 17 July 1919 column:

“How many balls have we left, caddy?”
“Five, sir.” (Wondering where the old sapp gets that we stuff.)
THE OLD BLIMP KNOWS that he can’t finish the voyage with only five pills in his fuel tank. They cost fifteen smackers a dozen, too.

While no one knows for certain why the aircraft are called blimps, the most likely explanation is that it is echoic, coined after the sound made when something strikes the gasbag. Late in life, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, who had been a midshipman at Capel air station during WWI, claimed to have witnessed his then commanding officer, Lt. A.D. Cunningham, hitting the gasbag of one of the craft with his thumb, and amused by the sound uttering the word “blimp.” It’s a plausible story, but Goddard didn’t get around to relating the tale until 1951, and the gap of several decades militates against its accuracy. Another possibility could be that it was coined as a play on blob and/or lump.

The origin that I fell for as a boy was that the military had two classes of lighter-than-air craft, Type A, Rigid and Type B, Limp, and blimp comes from the latter. Unfortunately for this explanation, there is no historical evidence for such designations.

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Sources:

Baer, Arthur “Bugs.” “Two and Three.” Atlanta Constitution, 17 July 1919, 13.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. blimp, n.1

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. blimp, n.1.

Paine, Ralph D. The Fighting Fleets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

The Rambler. “This Morning’s Gossip.” The Daily Mirror, 25 January 1916, 12.

Rice, Grantland. “Majority of Early Arrivals at Scene of Bout Favor Challenger.” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 3 July 1919, 23.

Rosher, Harold. In the Royal Naval Air Service. London: Chatto and Windus, September 1916.

Zimmer, Ben. “A Weighted Term Floats Back into the News.” Wall Street Journal, 8–9 June 2019, C4.

Photo credit: Department of the Navy, 1933.