no quarter

1 June 2020

1 June 2020 tweet by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) calling for “no quarter” for rioters

On 1 June 2020, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, recommended sending in the U.S. military to quell the riots that had erupted across the nation as a result of the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. He tweeted that the troops should do:

whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.

When it was pointed out to him that no quarter meant the summary execution of prisoners, Cotton tweeted links to Merriam-Webster and Collins dictionaries. Merriam-Webster defines no quarter as:

No pity or mercy —used to say that an enemy, opponent, etc., is treated in a very harsh way

And Collins defines it thusly:

If you say that someone was given no quarter, you mean that they were not treated kindly by someone who had power or control over them.

And the American Heritage Dictionary, which Cotton did not cite, defines it as:

Mercy or clemency, especially when displayed or given to an enemy

1 June 2020 tweet by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) tweeting links to “no quarter” in dictionaries

But the situation is more nuanced. There are two operative definitions of quarter, one that is literal and regards the military, and one that is figurative. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the literal sense of quarter as:

Exemption from being immediately put to death granted to a vanquished opponent by the victor in a battle or fight; clemency or mercy shown in sparing the life of a person who surrenders.

Under this definition, an order of no quarter is indeed a horrific crime.

But the OED also outlines a separate, figurative sense. It is this figurative sense that Collins refers to. And Merriam-Webster and American Heritage pack both the literal and figurative senses into one definition.

Now, we can’t get inside Cotton’s head and know what he intended when he tweeted the phrase, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how the phrase is understood, and it will be understood in the context of the long history of police brutality against people of color. Cotton, intentionally or not, is playing it both ways. He is sending out a dogwhistle of when the looting starts, the shooting starts that has a long, racist history, and then hiding behind the milder, “not treated kindly,” definition when others call him on it.

But this sense of quarter is, to our present-day ears, a rather strange usage. It doesn’t seem related to the sense of one fourth of something or an area or neighborhood. Most uses of quarter in English come from the Anglo-Norman quartier. The sense of military clemency also comes from this French word, but it is a later development, a re-borrowing of the French word during the early modern era. It comes out of the phrase quartier de sauveté, referring to a place of refuge allowed to retreating forces after a battle. So, to say no quarter is to deny the enemy a retreat or surrender and force them to fight to the death.

This military sense of quarter appears in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary, which defines the French quartier as

quarter, or faire war, wherein souldiers are taken prisoners and ransomed at a certaine rate.

An early use of no quarter is in a letter by James Howell to the Earl of Bristol, written after 1631 and published in 1645. Howell refers to the sack of the Protestant town of Magdeburg in 1631 during the Thirty Years War by Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire:

But passing neer Magdenburg, being diffident of his own strength he suffer’d Tilly to take that great town with so much effusion of bloud, because they wold receave no quarter.

Some 20,000 people died in the massacre.

Figurative use of no quarter is in place by the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe uses it in his 1725 The Complete English Tradesman:

What shall we say to the peace and satisfaction of mind in breaking, which the tradesman will always have when he acts the honest part, and breaks betimes; compared to the guilt and chagrin of the mind, occasioned by a running on, as I said, to the last gasp, when they have little to pay? Then indeed the tradesman can expect no quarter from his creditors, and will have no quiet in himself.

No quarter can refer to either summary executions or to the lighter “not treated kindly,” which is intended depends on the context. And in the context of deploying troops, an order of no quarter should mean only one thing: a horrific crime.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. quarter n.

Collins Dictionary, no date, s.v. no quarter.

Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London: Adam Islip, 1611, s.v. quartier. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Defoe, Daniel. The Complete English Tradesman. London: Charles Rivington, 1725, 96. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Howell, James. “Letter to the Earle of Bristol.” Epistolæ Ho-Eleinanæ. Familiar Letters. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1645, 5.37.41. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, accessed 1 June 2020, s.v. no quarter.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. quarter, n.

when the looting starts, the shooting starts

Donald Trump’s 29 May 2020 tweet repeating the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”

1 June 2020

On 29 May, Donald Trump tweeted the following in reference to riots in Minneapolis following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer:

These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

Twitter subsequently placed a warning label on the tweet, making it invisible unless the user clicked on it, saying it violated their rules against glorifying violence.

The phrase when the looting starts, the shooting starts has a long and racist history. And regardless of whether or not Trump was aware of the phrase’s history, it functions as a racist dogwhistle.

The phrase was first uttered by Miami Police Chief Walter Headley on 26 December 1967 at a news conference about a series of armed robberies in black neighborhoods of the city. The Miami News of 26 December 1967 reported Headley responding to a question about whether his tough-on-crime policies might spark civil unrest among the city’s black population:

“This is war,” he said as he issued a warning that anyone caught in the act of committing a crime stands a good chance of getting shot.
[...]
He said officers will “stop and frisk” any group of people milling around, regardless of age.
[...]
Asked if he thought this might cause riots such as have occurred elsewhere in the nation, Headley replied:
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts (meaning his men). These are my orders. Not three days after, but now.”

The Miami Herald reported Headley’s statement as:

We haven’t had any serious problems with civil uprisings and looting because I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts.

The quote was widely reported in hundreds of newspaper articles across the United States in the following days. It was not a minor story.

Much of the 2020 reporting on the history of the phrase conflates the circumstances of Headley uttering the line with the riot that occurred in Miami in August of the following year and the riots across the United States following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968. Headley was speaking months earlier about what he would do if rioting broke out, which it did on 7 August 1968 in the black Liberty City neighborhood at a rally protesting the Republican National Convention that was being held in the city. An overly aggressive police response to some disorderly conduct led to widespread rioting and vandalism, and the failure of the governor and city officials to appear at a meeting with black community leaders the following day led to further rioting, which was suppressed by police and the National Guard, resulting in three deaths. So, Headley ended up fulfilling the threat he had uttered eight months earlier. Headley died in November 1968.

Some allege that segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace repeated Headley’s phrase during his 1968 presidential campaign. I have found no contemporary evidence that Wallace said the phrase—the closest I’ve found is a 2005 recollection of him saying it. But prior to Headley’s utterance, Wallace did say something worse. The Los Angeles Times of 10 September 1967 reports Wallace as saying:

Bam, shoot ‘em dead on the spot! Shoot to kill if anyone throws a rock at a policeman or throws a Molotov cocktail. Don’t shoot any children, just shoot that adult standing beside the kid that throws the rock. That may not prevent the burning and looting, but it sure will stop it after it starts.

Those who recall Wallace saying it would seem to be conflating two separate memories. And even if Wallace didn’t utter those exact words, the sentiment and message were the same, so connecting the two messages is not an error.

Headley was a racist and under his leadership the Miami police department engaged in aggressive and discriminatory tactics against the city’s black population. And the phrase when the looting starts, the shooting starts carries unmistakably racist implications.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Nelson, Jack. “Wallace Would End Rioting With Bullets.” Los Angeles Times, 10 September 1967, C48S. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Savage, Jim. “Miami Police Open Up ‘Get Tough Policy.’” Miami Herald, 27 December 1967, 1A. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Trump, Donald J, @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, 29 May 2020.

Wilcox, Bob. “‘I Have Leaders’ Support.’” Miami News, 26 December 1967, 1A. ProQuest.

blue moon

A blue-colored moon (hypothetical representation), 2014

1 June 2020

Once a year or so, news and social media sites fill with articles and posts about how that month there will be a blue moon and that encourage people to go out and see this “rare” event. This astronomical definition, or more accurately definitions as there are two competing ones, is relatively recent in origin. Use of the phrase blue moon is quite old and has meant different things over the centuries.

The oldest of these senses is the idea that a blue moon is an absurdity, something that can’t actually exist. From the 1528 anti-Protestant polemic Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe by William Barlow:

Agaynst god they are so stobbourne /
That scripture they tosse and tourne /
After their owne ymaginacion.
Yf they saye the mone is belewe /
We must beleve that it is true /
Admittynge their interpretacion.

This use, however, seems to be a singular one, chosen for the rhyme. There is little evidence of blue moon being used elsewhere in the sixteenth century to mean an absurdity.

Blue moon is, however, starting around 1700, used to mean a moon, or a graphic representation of a moon, that is literally blue. One of the earliest of these uses was in 1702 when lepidopterist James Petiver noted blue markings resembling moons on a species of butterfly:

Papilo Sulphureus, lunulis cæruleis, nigris lituris insignitus. This exactly resembles our English Brimstone Butterfly Mus. nost. No. 1. were it not for those black Spots, and apparent blue Moons in the lower Wings. This is the only one I have yet seen.

In 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley writes of an actual moon that appears blue in his poem Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude, lines 193–99:

Roused by the shock he started from his trance—
The cold white light of morning, the blue moon
Low in the west, the clear and garish hills,
The distinct valley and the vacant woods,
Spread round him where he stood. Whither have fled
The hues of heaven that canopied his bower
Of yesternight?

And of course, there is the 1934 Rodgers and Hart song Blue Moon, which has been covered by countless artists over ensuing decades, in which the color represents the singer’s state of sadness and loneliness:

Blue Moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

The moon can actually appear as blue due to smoke or dust in the atmosphere, such as after a large volcanic eruption, forest fires, or from industrial pollution, and sometimes blue moon is used in this literal sense.

I’ve been including longer quotations than commonly occur in dictionary citations because sometimes an expanded context is necessary to understand the usage in question. An example is this one that would appear to be of just such a literal blue moon that appears in the Oxford English Dictionary from an 1883 article in Science. The OED citation reads:

The red sun and the blue moon mean higher temperature and general rain.

One might legitimately interpret this citation as referring to the moon in the sky, while in actuality, the article is about a means of signaling weather reports via a visual system on railroad cars. In fuller context, it reads:

The red signals are confined to predictions as to temperature,—rise in temperature, stationary temperature, falling temperature. The other color is blue, and that is confined to predictions in regard to the general state of the weather. The question of form was a good deal considered, and three forms were adopted. We adopted the sun, moon, and star, because everybody was familiar with those words. We experimented with the triangle, and finally rejected it. The device for attaching to the car is due to Mr. Anderson, who has been in the service of the board of commissioners for the past year; and it is a really happy device. The signal is made as large as possible, and the disk can be seen a long distance. The red sun and blue moon mean higher temperature and general rain.

So, this instance has nothing to do with astronomy and or how the moon appears in the sky, and one can sometimes be misled if one relies on the dictionary citations alone.

The moon has also long been used as a measure of time, in particular the passage of a month, and the phrase once in a moon, meaning once a month (or every 29.5 days if you want to be precise), dates back several centuries. From Andrew Boorde’s 1547 A Breuiary of Healthe:

Also there is an other kinde of madnesse named Lunaticus the which is madnesse that doth infest a man ones in a mone the whiche doth cause one to be geryshe, & wauerynge wyttid, nat constant, but fantasticall.

But when it comes to a blue moon, the period of time is rarely defined with such specificity. In 1821, writer Pierce Egan in his Real Life in London records a conversation in which the phrase is used to refer to a long period of time:

Their attention was at this moment attracted by the appearance of two persons dressed in the extreme of fashion, who, upon meeting just by them, caught eagerly hold of each other’s hands, and they overheard the following—“Why, Bill, how am you, my hearty?—where have been trotting your galloper?—what is you arter?—how’s Harry and Ben?—haven’t seen you this blue moon.”

And Egan includes this note at the bottom of the page:

Blue moon—This is usually intended to imply a long time.

Hence the phrase once in a blue moon refers to something that occurs rarely or never. The phrase appears in the early nineteenth century, about a decade after Egan wrote his book. There is this from a review of James Planché’s 1833 production of Verdi’s opera Gustavus the Third in the pages of the Athenæum in which the phrase is used and unremarked upon:

We are no advocates for the eternal system of producing foreign operas to the exclusion of the works of English composers, but once in a blue moon such a thing may be allowed.

Finally, we get to the astronomical definitions, which are both from the first half of the twentieth century. The first is from the 1937 issue of the Maine Farmer’s Almanac, which defines a blue moon as the third full moon in a season that contains four full moons. (Most seasons have only three full moons.) Such a happening occurs about once every 2.5 years. The explanation in the almanac, which I give in full, is historically and linguistically inaccurate, so put no stock in its factual claims (reading it makes the medievalist in me shudder):

THE MOON usually comes full twelve times a year, three times in each season. These moons were named by our early English ancestors as follows:

                                 Yule
Winter                      | 0 Moon after Yule
Moons                     | 1 Wolf Moon
                                | 2 Lenten Moon
                                 First Day of Spring
Spring                      | 3 Egg Moon
Moons                      | 4 Milk Moon
                                 | 5 Flower Moon
                                 The Long Day
Summer                   | 6 Hay Moon
Moons                      | 7 Grain Moon
                                 | 8 Fruit Moon
                                 Summer’s End
Fall                            | 9 Harvest Moon
Moons                      | 10 Hunter’s Moon
                                 | 11 Moon Before Yule

However, occasionally the moon comes full thirteen times in a year. This was considered a very unfortunate circumstance, especially by the monks who had charge of the calendar. It became necessary for them to make a calendar of thirteen months for that year, and it upset the regular arrangement of church festivals. For this reason thirteen came to be considered an unlucky number. Also, this extra moon had a way of coming in each of the seasons so that it could not be given a name appropriate to the time of year like the other moons. It was usually called the Blue Moon. There are seven Blue Moons in a Lunar Cycle of nineteen years. This year (1937) has a Blue Moon in August the same as 1918. In 1934 and 1915 Blue Moons came in November. The next Blue Moon will occur in May 1940 as it did in 1921. There was a Blue Moon in February 1924. In olden times the almanac makers had much difficulty calculating the occurrence of the Blue Moon and this uncertainty gave rise to the expression “Once in a Blue Moon.”

The second, and more common, astronomical definition appears in an article by James Hugh Pruett in the March 1946 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine and is a misinterpretation of the definition in the earlier Maine Farmer’s Almanac. According to Pruett’s definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month.

Seven times in 19 years there were—and still are—13 full moons in a year. This gives 11 months with one full moon each and one with two. This second in a month, so I interpret it, was called Blue Moon.

This second definition was used again in a 1950 issue of Sky and Telescope and was repeated by several other popular sources, most notably the 1986 release of the game Trivial Pursuit. As a result, the idea that a blue moon is the second full moon of a month has become widespread, but it is not an old definition and has nothing to do with the phrase once in a blue moon.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Barlow, William, Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe, 1528. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Boorde, Andrew. A Breuiary of Healthe. 1547, Part 2, fol. 15. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Egan, Pierce. Real Life in London. London: Jones & Co., 1821, 249.

Hiscock, Philip. “Once in a Blue Moon.” Sky and Telescope, March 1999, 53–55.

Mendenhall, T.C. “A Method of Distributing Weather Forecasts by Means of Railways.” Science, 2.29, 24 August 1883, 252.

Olson, Donald W., Richard Fienberg, and Roger W. Sinnott. “What’s a Blue Moon?” Sky and Telescope, May 1999, 36–38.

Olson, Donald W. and Roger W. Simott. “Blue-Moon Myster Solved?” Sky and Telescope, March 1999, 55.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2013, s.v. blue moon, n.; June 2004, s.v. once, adv., conj., adj., and n.; December 2002, s.v. moon, n.1.

Petiver, James. Gazophylacii Naturæ & Artis. London: 1702, 16. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Alastor (1816). Reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1975. University of Toronto, Representative Poetry Online.

“Theatricals.” Athenæum. 316. London, 16 November 1833, 780.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 US.

bloody

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

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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

A fish being cut up for use as bait

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

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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,