tear gas / pepper spray

6 June 2020

[While I do address the origins of the terms tear gas and pepper spray in this piece, much of what follows has little to do with historical linguistics and instead comes from my experience as a U.S. Army chemical officer and my past work on the U.S. delegation to the Chemical Weapons Convention Preparatory Commission (CWC) and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the U.S. Senate’s CWC ratification hearings. The definition and allowed uses of “riot control agents” was a controversial topic during ratification.]

Tear gas is a general term for lachrymatory agents that typically cause eye and respiratory pain and in high doses can irritate the skin. Their effects are generally transitory but can be long-lasting and more serious if the tear gas exacerbates an underlying medical condition. And use during the COVID-19 pandemic carries additional risk by making those exposed to the gas more susceptible to the respiratory illness. Deaths from tear gas are rare, but not unknown, and tear gases are classified as “non-lethal.” They are commonly used by police forces worldwide.

The earliest use of tear gas that I have found is this item that appeared in the Asbury Park Press on 11 November 1910:

Baltimore—Answering a burglar alarms [sic]. Patrolmen Edward Miller and Joseph Bullinger heard thuds and crashes behind the basement door at William T. Corrum’s home.

With guns cocked and tear gas in reserve, they rushed in—and fled, along with a skunk that had a salad dressing jar firmly wedged over its head.

Of course, tear gas and other far more lethal chemicals were widely used during the First World War. Here is a mention of tear gas in the trench newspaper The Wipers Times from 25 December 1916:

I wonder if he’s heard the tale of the Transport Officer and the rum. Of course there are many tales of T.O.’s and rum. The oldest one of all is the one of the T.O. who was coming up with the rations. The said rations included “rum for weary soldiers.” Also the cargo had a consignment of tear-gas in a ram-jar [sic] for the M.O. to try a few experiments with. That is all the tale—but I may as well add that the T.O. recovered.

There is no chemical definition of or criteria for what constitutes a tear gas, and a wide variety of substances are labeled as such. These include: CS gas (2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile), which is used by the U.S. military; CN gas (phenacyl chloride), which is more toxic and therefore less widely used; OC agents (oleoresin capsicum), better known as pepper spray or pepper gas, which are commonly used by police forces; and Mace which is a branded product containing a mix of agents. Mace originally used CN, but that has been replaced by OC agents in most Mace products, although a CN-OC version is still on the market.

The terms pepper spray or pepper gas, referring to OC, are technically accurate, but serve as euphemisms. Oleoresin capsicum is naturally occurring in pepper plants and chili powder and is what gives those foods their pungent taste, but the chemical agents in so-called pepper spray are synthetic, concentrated, and are far nastier than anything found in nature.

The earliest use of pepper gas that I have found is in an Associated Press story of 4 October 1923 about four convicts who attempted an escape from a Kentucky prison, only to end up barricading themselves in the prison’s kitchen:

A tear gas machine brought here last night proved unavailable as the operators could not get close enuf to lossen [sic] its streams effectively. Officials devised the ingenious plan of charging the steam pipes leading to the kitchen with pepper gas intending to smoke the men out.

And the use of pepper spray to refer to a lachrymatory agent dates to at least 8 February 1964 in another Associated Press article:

Pepper Spray Gun Protects Gals Against Muggers

New York (AP)—Women who want to protect themselves against attacks by muggers are now offered a spray repellent which shoots a solution of cayenne pepper about 15 feet.

Among new products is this aerosol device called “rebuff,” offered by Animal Repellents, Griffin, Ga. The manufacturer says this liquid will make any human attacker very uncomfortable for at least 10 minutes but will have no lasting adverse effects. It’s similar to the company’s dog repellent called “Halt!” but is much weaker. The police department of Saigon has ordered 3,600 units of “Rebuff,” the company says.

The fact that there is no clear distinction between chemical agents like CS and CN and chemical agents like OC has resulted in confusion at times. For example, on 1 June 2020 the U.S. Park Police used lachrymatory agents to clear crowds from Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to allow Donald Trump to conduct a photo op in front of a church. The Park Police initially denied having used “tear gas,” but later retracted that statement, clarifying that they meant they hadn’t used CS or CN, when in fact they had used “pepper balls.” Then the Park Police retracted the clarification and again insisted they hadn’t used “tear gas.” The Park Police were engaging (ineptly) in semantic sophistry. The term tear gas covers all of these, and they were trying to make a distinction when none existed.

Some wonder why. if chemical warfare agents are banned by international law, specifically by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), police are allowed to use tear gas. The simple answer is that the CWC permits use of riot control agents for domestic law enforcement purposes. I cannot speak to what is permitted under any country’s domestic laws or rules regarding use of force, and those will vary from place to place, but I can address how tear gas and pepper spray are considered under international law.

The CWC regulates toxic chemicals, placing them on three different “Schedules,” depending on their toxicity and use in warfare. But the treaty defines a riot control agent as:

Any chemical not listed in a Schedule, which can produce rapidly in humans sensory irritation or disabling physical effects which disappear within a short time following termination of exposure.

Since they are not on the treaty’s Schedules, riot control agents fall outside the treaty’s ordinary regulation and verification regime, but the treaty still requires that:

Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare.

But the treaty does not define method of warfare. This lack of a definition is deliberate; as the negotiators could not find a definition that all could agree upon, it was left deliberately vague, to be interpreted on a case-by-case basis.

And under purposes not prohibited under this Convention, the CWC includes:

Law enforcement including domestic riot control purposes.

So, to sum up, use of tear gas in war is banned by international law, but the use of tear gas is allowed domestically and in certain undefined, non-combat military situations.

A major reason the phrase method of warfare was left vague is that the United States wanted its military to be able to use riot control agents in certain situations. U.S. military use of riot control agents is governed by Executive Order 11850 of 8 April 1975, signed by Gerald Ford as part of the post-Vietnam reforms of the military. It prohibits:

First use of riot control agents in war except in defensive military modes to save lives such as:
(a) Use of riot control agents in riot control situations in areas under direct and distinct U.S. military control, to include controlling rioting prisoners of war.
(b) Use of riot control agents in situations in which civilians are used to mask or screen attacks and civilian casualties can be reduced or avoided.
(c) Use of riot control agents in rescue missions in remotely isolated areas, of downed aircrews and passengers, and escaping prisoners.
(d) Use of riot control agents in rear echelon areas outside the zone of immediate combat to protect convoys from civil disturbances, terrorists and paramilitary organizations.

The treaty, as written, leaves intact the executive order, except for the first use phrase. Retaliatory use as a method of warfare is illegal.

Furthermore, when it gave its consent to ratification of the CWC, the Senate made the following reservation to the treaty:

(26) Riot control agents:

(A) Permitted uses. — Prior to the deposit of the United States instrument of ratification, the President shall certify to Congress that the United States is not restricted by the Convention in its use of riot control agents, including the use against combatants who are parties to a conflict, in any of the following cases:

(i) United States not a party. — The conduct of peacetime military operations within an area of ongoing armed conflict when the United States is not a party to the conflict (such as recent use of the United States Armed Forces in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda).

(ii) Consensual peacekeeping. — Consensual peacekeeping operations when the use of force is authorized by the receiving state, including operations pursuant to Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter.

(iii) Chapter vii peacekeeping. — Peacekeeping operations when force is authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.

(B) Implementation. — The President shall take no measure, and prescribe no rule or regulation, which would alter or eliminate Executive Order 11850 of April 8, 1975.

This reservation makes E.O. 11850, not the CWC, the only governing authority for U.S. use of riot control agents, but also prevents a future president from unilaterally changing or rescinding the executive order.

So, that’s it. The term tear gas encompasses pepper spray and pepper gas, and while its military use is limited, police are allowed to use it for domestic law enforcement purposes.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Another Guard Dies; Convicts Yet Barricaded in Kitchen.” The Daily Democrat (Tallahassee, FL), 4 October 1923, 1. ProQuest.

“By Order” The B.E.F. Times with Which Are Incorporated the Wipers Times, the ‘New Church’ Times, the Kemmel Times & the Somme-Times, vol. 1, no. 2, 25 December 1916. ProQuest.

“Flashes of Light: Improvised Gas Mask.” Asbury Park Evening Press, 11 November 1910, 17. ProQuest.

Ford, Gerald. Executive Order 11850--Renunciation of Certain Uses in War of Chemical Herbicides and Riot Control Agents. 8 April 1975.

Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction. 27 September 2005.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tear, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2005, s.v. pepper spray, n., pepper gas, n.

“Pepper Spray Gun Protects Gals Against Muggers.” Plain-Dealer (Cleveland, OH), 8 February 1964, 20. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

U.S. Park Police. “Statement from United States Park Police acting Chief Gregory T. Monahan about the actions taken over the weekend to protect life and property.” 2 June 2020 (updated as of 4 June 2020).

“U.S. Senate’s Conditions to the Ratification of the CWC.” Senate Resolution 75, 105th Congress, 1st Session, 24 April 1997.

Ward, Alex. “US Park Police Said Using ‘Tear Gas’ in a Statement Was a ‘Mistake.’ It Just Used the Term Again.” Vox.com, 5 June 2020.

bogart

6 June 2020

WILLOW:      Oh, and while you're up, could I get a refill? [holds out her glass] It's just I'm so comfortable.
JOYCE:         [steps over] Of course. [takes the glass]
WILLOW:      Thanks. Xander: Oh, oh, oh, [holds up an empty bag] and another bag of cheesy chips. [tosses the bag away]
JOYCE:         [raises her eyebrows at him] Uh, you ate the last one.
XANDER:      No, there's another bag hidden behind the raisins.
JOYCE:         [sighs] I'm on it. [leaves]
XANDER:      [to Buffy] Your mom's tryin' to Bogart the cheesy chips. What's that all about?

            —Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series), 1998

Humphrey Bogart, 1940. Publicity photo for the film Brother Orchid

To bogart something is to monopolize or hoard something that should be shared, especially a marijuana joint. The word obviously comes from the name of the actor Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957), but why? Bogart was not associated with marijuana or drug culture, and while some of the characters he played were greedy (e.g., Fred C. Dobbs in John Huston’s 1948 The Treasure of Sierra Madre), he was not particularly known for playing such characters. Rather, his screen persona was more often that of the tough guy, often a bully or gangster. And indeed, it is in the role of the tough guy that bogart makes its way into slang.

Bogart appears as a noun in early 1950s bartending slang of the American West, as recorded in a glossary published in the journal Western Folklore in 1951:

To pull a Bogart, to act tough.

But it either did not start out as restricted to a professional jargon in a particular region or it spread quickly, because it is recorded in an article on youth slang in the New York Herald Tribune on 28 February 1954:

The greatest source of these expressions today is the tough talk of the many private eyes on television, in the movies and in fiction," Rand observes. "'Doing time' is used for staying after school and the 'chain gang' refers to walking to class in groups. A bright kid who knows all the answers and makes his classmates look bad is a 'stool pigeon' and the school principal is the 'warden.' A ‘caper' is a problem in geometry, with 'Humphrey Bogart' being any tough kid."

And it wasn’t just teen and bartending slang for a tough act or person. Black slang took the word up, with bogart becoming a noun for a bully or aggressive person. And in Black slang it also became a verb meaning to coerce or intimidate, as in this example from Ebony magazine in March 1965:

Bogart, to muscle through—as in “Dig up, let's grab a boss broad and bogart our way into a boss jam.”

And from the sense of to bully, the verb quickly came to mean to take more than one’s share, particularly in the context of illicit drugs. From the 1967 edition of Maurer and Vogel’s Narcotics and Narcotics Addiction:

bogart. To take more than one’s fair share, usually by violence.

It doesn’t appear in the earlier editions of this book.

The slang verb came to the attention of mainstream America with Elliot Ingber and Larry Wagner’s 1968 song “Don’t Bogart Me,” which was recorded by the Fraternity of Man and featured in the 1969 film Easy Rider:

Roll another one
Just like the other one
You've been hanging on to it
And I sure would like a hit
Don't bogart that joint, my friend
Pass it over to me

From there, the word was passed over to a much wider audience.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Des Hotel, Rob and Dean Batali. “Killed by Death.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2.18. Created by Joss Whedon. 3 March 1998.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2005, s.v. bogart, v.

Maurer, David W. and Victor H. Vogel. Narcotics and Narcotics Addiction, third edition. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1967, 343. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Racklin, Beaulah. “Do Kids Speak English.” New York Herald Tribune. 28 February 1954, 46.

Wallrich, William J. “Barroom Slang from the Upper Rio Grande.” Western Folklore, 10.2, April 1951, 172.

Photo credit: Warner Bros.

identity politics

3 June 2020

Identity politics is advocacy by those with a particular racial, sexual, or cultural identity for policies that benefit that particular group, as opposed to the populace at large. The term arose in the 1960s and 70s among minorities in the United States, particular among black political activists, who advocated for an end to discriminatory policies and for policies that promoted equality. But identity politics is not, by definition, limited to minorities. The dominant racial or cultural group in any given polity can also be an identity, and policies and institutions that discriminate against other groups or maintain conditions of inequality are also a form of identity politics.

The earliest use of the phrase identity politics that I have found is in the Atlanta Daily World of 16 July 1970 in an article about the politics of the Alabama governor George Wallace and how he weaponized black identity politics to give coherence and motivation to his racist supporters who were engaged in white identity politics:

Shrewdly, Mr. Wallace made capital of what could be called identity politics in which the “strange bedfellows,” the “black bloc vote” and those “big city newspapers” were made villains and targets. Such hate symbolism found easy believers among the gullible, the bigoted, the unthinking, and the odd bloc.

The Atlanta Daily World is a newspaper serving the black community of Georgia. The “what could be called” makes it clear that the term, if it were already in circulation in the black community, wasn’t instantly familiar to many of the paper’s readers.

In 1973, sociologist and political activist Todd Gitlin used identity politics to retroactively describe the radical political movements of the late 1960s, in particular the group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He viewed identity politics negatively, believing that its, perhaps inevitable, growth stifled any hope of a truly revolutionary movement taking shape. The quotation here is long, but I believe the length is necessary to understand the context in which Gitlin uses the term:

In the absence of radical movement elsewhere in the society, [the radical student movement] could even claim that it was the embryo of revolutionary agency itself (“we are the people”)—a movement for itself. In other moments (community and factory organizing), it tried to repudiate its social reality by claiming to be the instrument, or the vanguard, or the catalyst, of social forces that really were oppressed (the poor, blacks, industrial workers, the Third World) and capable of taking power—a movement for others. Throughout the sixties the movement oscillated between these poles, searching more for identity than for strategy.

Unable to carry the burden of historical novelty, sects within SDS (Progressive Labor, Weatherman, Revolutionary Youth Movement) took on pseudo-identities as self-appointed vanguards and fifth columns of other forces. Thus they could hold onto their elitist belief in their right to rule, while claiming to have entered the revolutionary lists in the name of their chosen constituencies. They split and devoured SDS so easily because they capitalized on a widespread self-doubt: with a rush they occupied a vacuum of identity and strategy, virtually without opposition. Identity politics swallowed itself. The alternative, a conscious, programmatic radicalism, has not yet formed.

Many credit the Combahee River Collective, a black, feminist movement of the 1970s, with coining the term identity politics. While they did not, as we have seen from the earlier uses, invent the term, they did embrace it. Unlike Gitlin, they did not view an overarching revolutionary movement as a good thing for them. From their perspective, no movement led by men was ever going to truly advocate for equality for black women, and it would be up to themselves to fight for it. From the collective’s 1977 statement:

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

Since the early 1970s, the term has been used both positively and negatively.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). In Zillah R. Eisenstein. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979, 365. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gitlin, Todd. “The Future of an Effusion: How Young Activists Will Get to 1984.” In 1984 Revisited. Robert Paul Wolff, ed. New York: Knopf, 1973, 27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. identity, n.

“A Spokesman for Racism.” Atlanta Daily World. 16 July 1970, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

stop and frisk

3 June 2020

The police tactic of stop and frisk is most closely associated with New York City in the 1990s and early 2000s under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, but it is decades older and from its inception has been used a means to target and harass people of color. A Harvard Law Review article from December 1964 describes the tactic:

The New York "stop-and-frisk" law clarifies and significantly broadens statutory police powers to stop and search suspects, although present police practices may well exceed the new law's limits. Under the law, effective July 1, I964, a police officer may "stop" any person abroad in a public place who he "reasonably suspects" is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a felony or serious misdemeanor, and may demand his name, address, and an explanation of his actions. In addition, a policeman who "reasonably suspects" that he is in "danger of life or limb" may search the suspect for a dangerous weapon.

Such searches are also known as Terry stops, after the U.S. Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio (1968) that found the tactic to be constitutional.

In New York City, the stop and frisk tactic was used more aggressively in the 1990s under the leadership of then Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton, and it was taken to new heights under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg. It was used alongside the longer-term strategy of broken windows policing, the idea that fixing broken windows, erasing graffiti, and cracking down on misdemeanors would deter felonies. But the tactic was harshly criticized for disproportionately targeting people of color, as a tactic for oppressing minorities, and for disrupting minority communities by imprisoning large numbers of young men. Since the 1990s, the strategy of broken windows policing has also been shown to be ineffective at reducing serious crime.

While stop and frisk came to the fore in the 1990s, the date of the Harvard Law Review article quoted above shows the tactic is much older. It came into being during the Civil Rights era, and while such searches were ostensibly intended to protect police officers, they were often used as a means to shut down dissent by giving the police a pretext for arresting demonstrators.

The earliest use of the co-location of the words stop and frisk that I have found is from the New York Times of 15 January 1964:

Rodriguez and Solero were arrested for disorderly conduct on West End Avenue near 93d Street and were being driven to the 100th Street Station when, according to the police, Rodriguez began moving around in the back seat. The police said the patrolmen decided to stop and frisk Rodriguez.

As the car halted under an overpass at Riverside Drive and 96th Street, the police said, Rodriguez pulled a revolver and fired a shot that hit the dashboard. After a brief struggle, the police said, Patrolman Edmondson fired four times, killing both prisoners.

Note this is not a use of the phrase as we know it today. The suspect was already detained when the police stopped their police cruiser to frisk the suspect. But it is significant in that incidents like this one would create the political will to implement the stop and frisk law, as prior to that the police did not have authority to search a suspect until they had been formally arrested. Also of note is that the suspect was Puerto Rican, and the shooting was considered unjustified by the LatinX community.

And two weeks later stop and frisk, in the form and sense we know today, appears in the New York Daily News of 4 February 1964:

Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy yesterday urged support of the “stop and frisk bill” and the “knock-knock [sic] bill” now before the Legislature. The measures would allow cops to search persons suspected of criminal activity and permit police with search warrants to enter a home without knocking.

Those laws would be passed and signed by the governor the following month. And at the time the stop and frisk law was widely criticized by minority communities for being a tool of racist oppression. Here is an example from the Nation of Islam’s newspaper Muhammad Speaks of 27 March 1964. The rhetoric is over the top, but the underlying sentiment was widely shared:

Two notorious so-called anti-crime bills were signed into law by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, setting up a “police state” atmosphere, with Negroes and Puerto Ricans—traditional targets of harassment by law-enforcement agents in America undoubtedly scheduled to be the chief victims

The iniquitous bills, commonly referred to as “stop-and-frisk” and “no-knock” laws, are thought by many authorities to set up the machinery to rival Torquemada and his Star Chambers Proceedings and Hitlers Gestapo.

The tactic of stop and frisk may date to 1964, but the individual words that constitute the phrase are, of course, much older.

Stop is a curious word because it appears much later than we might expect. One would think that such a basic verb would go back to Old English, but that language only has the verb forstoppian, meaning to block or obstruct, which only appears once in the extant literature in the context of a medical text as part of a cure for an earache (don’t try this at home):

eft wið þon ilcan genim grenne æscenne stæf, lege on fyr, genim þonne þæt seaw þe him of gæþ, do on þa ilcan wulle, wring on eare & mid þære ilcan wulle forstoppa þæt eare

(again for the same, take a green ash staff, lay it on a fire, then take the sap that comes from it, put it on the same wool, wring it into the ear, and stop up the ear with the same wool)

The form *stoppian may have existed, but if so, it does not survive in any text we know today. Instead, it appears during the Middle English period, coming from either the unattested *stoppian or as a borrowing from another Germanic language. The relevant sense of stop appears c.1440 in the English-Latin dictionary Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum:

Stoppyn’, or wythe stondynge a beest of goynge or rennyge. Sisto, Cath. obsto, Ug. (obsisto, P.)

(Stopping, or preventing an animal from going or running. Sisto, Cath. obsto, Ug. (obsisto, P.))

The Latin verbs being glossed mean to stop, oppose, resist, and stand in the way,

Frisk, on the other hand, is an early modern borrowing from French, originally meaning to move briskly, to frolic. It appears in John Rastell’s 1520 A New Iuterlude [sic], in a song about dancing:

So merely let vs daunce ey
And I can daunce it gyngerly
And I can fote it by & by
And I can pranke it [pro]pperly
And I can countenaunse comely
And I can kroke it curtesly
And I can lepe it lustly
And I can torn it trymly
And I can fryske it freshly
And I can loke it lordly
I can the thanke sensuall apetyte
That is þ[e] best daunce with out a pype

The connection to the adjective frisky can be seen in the above quotation.

The sense of searching a body arises out of the brisk movement of the searcher’s hands during a quick search. It appears in the c.1789 work Life’s Painter by George Parker:

Frisk’d. A knowing term used among traps, scouts and runners, when they take a person up on suspicion. They frisk him, that is, search him to find pawn-brokers, duplicates, writings, or property, that may tend to discovery.

Discuss this post

---

[I’ve edited the original post to reflect the fact that stop and frisk in New York City reached its height under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg, not Giuliani.]

Sources:

Cockayne, Oswald. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England (1864–66), vol. 2 of 2. Wiesbaden: Kraus Reprint, 1965, 42–43. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kaplan, Samuel. “Police Move to Win Puerto Rican Amity.” New York Times, 15 January 1964, 1, 21. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Leaks, Sylvester. “N.Y.s’ New No Knock Law.” Muhammad Speaks., 27 March 1964, 22. JSTOR.

“Murf Backs Bills For Quick Search.” Daily News (New York), 4 February 1964, 37. ProQuest.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. stop, v., frisk, v., frisk, adj.

Galfridus, Anglicus. Promptorium parvulorum sive clericorum, vol 3 of 3. Albert Way, ed. London: Camden Society, 1865, 477. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Parker, George. Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life. Dublin[?]: c. 1790, 136. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Rastell, John. A New Iuterlude. London: J. Rastell, 1520. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Recent Statute: Criminal Law—New York Authorizes Police To “Stop-And-Frisk” on Reasonable Suspicion.” Harvard Law Review, 78.2, December 1964, 473. JSTOR.

blurb

The original blurb, for Gelett Burgess’s 1907 book Are You A Bromide?, featuring Belinda Blurb

2 June 2020

Must of us know that a blurb is a short testimonial printed on a book jacket that touts and extols the book’s virtue, encouraging prospective readers to buy it. The word is a weird one, with comic overtones, and unusually it is one word for which we know the precise origin.

The year is 1907 and humorist Gelett Burgess’s new book, Are You a Bromide?, is selling well and Burgess is one of the honorees at the annual dinner of the American Bookseller’s Convention. It’s the custom for authors to bring presentation copies of their books to the convention, and Burgess has a special book jacket prepared for 500 copies of his book featuring the picture of a woman, lifted from a dental advertisement, named Miss Belinda Blurb, “in the act of blurbing.” The picture is captioned, “YES, this is a ‘BLURB’! All the Other Publishers commit them. Why Shouldn’t We?”

The blurb goes on to say:

Say! Ain’t this book a 90-H. P., six-cylinder Seller? If We do say it as shouldn’t, WE consider that this man Burgess has got Henry James locked into the coal-bin, telephoning for “Information”

WE expect to sell 350 copies of this great, grand book. It has gush and go to it, it has that Certain Something which makes you want to crawl through thirty miles of dense tropical jungle and bite somebody on the neck. No hero no heroine, nothing like that for OURS, but when you’ve READ this masterpiece, you’ll know what a BOOK is.

Seven years later, Burgess “defined” the word in his Burgess Unabridged:

Blurb, n. 1. A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial. 2. Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.

Blurb, v. 1. To flatter from interested motives; to compliment oneself.

On the “jacket” of the “latest” fiction, we find the blurb; abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the “sensation of the year;” the blurb tells of  “thrills” and “heart-throbs,” of “vital importance” and “soul satisfying revelation.” The blurb speaks of the novel's “grip” and “excitement.” (See Alibosh.)

The circus advertiser started the blurb, but the book publisher discovered a more poignant charm than alliterative polysyllables. “It holds you from the first page—”

Now, you take this “Burgess Unabridged”— it's got a jump and a go to it—it's got a hang and a dash and a swing to it that pulls you right out of the chair, dazzles your eyes, and sets your hair to curling. It's an epoch-making, hearttickling, gorglorious tome of joy!

So, were not my publishers old-fashioned, would this my book be blurbed.

And Burgess defines alibosh as:

Al’i-bosh, n. A glaringly obvious falsehood; something not meant to be actually believed; a picturesque overstatement.

A circus poster is an alibosh; so is a seed catalogue, a woman’s age and an actress’s salary. (See Blurb.)

The word quickly caught on in the publishing industry, and the rest is history.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Burgess, Gelett. Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed.” New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914, 4, 7.

Mencken, H.L. The American Language, Supplement 1. New York: Knopf, 1945, 329n–30n.

“The Must-Read, Smash Hit Story of ‘Blurb.’” Merriam-Webster.com, n.d.

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

Image credit: Library of Congress.