broad

12 June 2020

Broad is a slang term for a woman. It is sexist and connotes that the woman in question is sexually promiscuous. This sense of the word appears in criminal slang in the early twentieth century. The metaphor underlying the sense is uncertain, although there is an early guess that is plausible.

The adjective broad, meaning wide, is from Proto-Germanic, and this standard sense can be found in Old English as brad. It, for instance, appears in Beowulf, lines 1545–47a, in the fight between Beowulf and Grendel’s Mother:

Ofsæt þa þone selegyst,          ond hyre seax geteah
brad ond brunecg;       wolde hire bearn wrecan
angan eaferan.

(Then she straddled her hall-guest and drew her dagger, broad and bright-edged; she wanted to avenge her child, her only kin.)

The earliest use of broad as a noun meaning woman that I am aware of is by cartoonist Thomas A. “TAD” Dorgan in 1913. The use is cited in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but I have been unable to locate the exact source, and while the denotation of broad to mean woman is clear, the context and connotations are not clear from the brief citation:

I caught Harry using my phone yesterday and took the message myself—she was some broad too.

The word is defined and given an etymology the next year in Jackson and Hellyer’s 1914 Vocabulary of Criminal Slang:

BROAD, Noun

Current amongst genteel grafters chiefly. A female confederate; a female companion; a woman of loose morals. See “DONY,” “FLUZIE,” “MUFF.” Broad is derived from the far-fetched metaphor of "meal ticket," signifying a female provider for a pimp, from the fanciful correspondence of a meal ticket to a railroad or other ticket, which latter originally was exclusively used by "gonifs" to indicate "broad," or a conductor's hat check. Also a playing card from the deck of fifty-two. A "three-card monte man" is a "BROAD SPIELER"; "Tipping the broads” is riding on a purchased transportation ticket; "Beating the broads" is corrupting the conductor or other collecting functionaire of a transportation line.

The proposal that the use comes from broad meaning ticket is plausible, but unlikely. Even Jackson and Hellyer deem it “far-fetched.” It’s plausible because broad has been used to mean a playing card since the eighteenth century. From George Parker’s Life’s Painter, c. 1790:

Sharps. Men of a contrary nature. This term is applied to sharpers in general, who are continually looking out for flats [i.e., “men who are easily taken in”], in order to them upon the broads, that is cards, or in short, any thing else, from pitch and hustle in Moorfields, to the Pharo table at St. James’s.

A move from playing cards to tickets of various sorts is plausible, although we have little evidence for such use outside of Jackson and Hellyer’s dictionary. So, their record of the term’s use as such may be a local usage peculiar to Portland, Oregon or the Pacific Northwest more widely. (Hellyer was a police detective in Portland, and much of his dictionary is based on his experience.) It’s tempting to treat this origin as authoritative because it appears close to the term’s appearance in print. If it’s older, the thinking goes, it must be closer to what those who coined it thought. But the opposite is usually the case. Later explanations, particularly advanced by those who have studied the entire corpus of evidence, which is growing as more and more old texts are digitized, are more likely to yield better answers.

Another suggestion, again advanced without evidence, is that it a sexually promiscuous woman is broad-minded. A more plausible speculation, but again just a guess, is that women are labeled broad because their hips tend to be broader than those of men.

In short, we don’t really know why this particular use of broad came to be. There are likely to be earlier examples of use to be found. Unfortunately, broad is a difficult word to search for in digital texts. Separating this slang sense from all the other senses of the word is laborious and not easy to automate. Perhaps, as more early examples of use are found, a clear origin will emerge.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I. University of Toronto, 2018, s.v. brad.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. broad n.2.

Jackson, Louis E. and C. R. Hellyer. A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang. 1914.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. broad, adj., n.1, and adv.

Parker, George. Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life, second edition. c. 1790. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

banana republic

1915 United Fruit Company advertisement

11 June 2020 [Minor correction on 12 June]

Many Americans know banana republic only as the name of clothing retailer, but the term comes from an older form of American capitalist exploitation. The term’s origins are enmeshed in the practices of dictatorial regimes, crony capitalism, the U.S. Marines and American colonialism, embezzlement, prison, and a book written in exile.

Journalist Robin Wright, writing in the New Yorker on 4 June 2020, defines banana republic as follows.

The term—which originally referred to a politically unstable country run by a dictator and his cronies, with an economy dependent on a single product—took on a life of its own. Over the past century, “banana republic” has evolved to mean any country (with or without bananas) that has a ruthless, corrupt, or just plain loopy leader who relies on the military and destroys state institutions in an egomaniacal quest for prolonged power.

Banana republic was coined by short-story writer O. Henry, the nom de plume of William Sydney Porter. In 1896, Porter was indicted for embezzling money from the bank where he worked, and he fled to Honduras, a country with which, at the time, the United States had no extradition treaty. At the time Honduras was a military dictatorship being run mainly for the benefit of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) and propped up by the threat of intervention by the U.S. Marines. During his self-imposed exile, Porter penned a series of short stories set in the fictional country of Anchuria, modeled after Honduras. In one, “The Admiral,” he first used the phrase banana republic:

In the constitution of this small, maritime banana republic was a forgotten section that provided for the maintenance of a navy. This provision—with many other wiser ones—had lain inert since the establishment of the republic. Anchuria had no navy and had no use for one.

Porter would return to the United States after six months to face trial, and while in prison published “The Admiral” in 1901. That story, and the others about Anchuria, would be collected in his 1904 Cabbages and Kings.

Banana republic quickly caught on as a general term for similar dictatorships. For example, there is this article from the 9 April 1907 Arizona Republican that not only uses the term, but outlines the power relationships in play in Honduras:

No Bombardment of Coast Towns: A Rule Laid Down for the Conduct of all Future Banana Republic Wars.

New Orleans, April 9.—That Puerto Cortez surrendered without fighting, and that about 1500 Honduran soldiers abandoned the port two days before the Nicaraguan troops appeared, was the information brought tonight by the steamer Anselm.

The Hondurans did not desert the post through cowardice, according to a dispatch, but they decided that the war was over. They returned to the banana plantations where most of them had been employed as laborers before the war began.

The United States marines closed all saloons in Ceiba after the abandonment of the port by the Hondurans. A proclamation was issued by Commander Fullam of the Marietta, Virgil C. Reynolds, U. S. vice consul, that the civil authorities would assume charge of the civil government, and that all l’quor saloons should be immediately closed. Capt. Fullam declared that the bombardments of the coast towns cannot be permitted during the frequent wars and revolutions in the Central American states.

And there is this theater review that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on 8 September 1909:

Walter De Leon is another of the old time favorites to return with the Hartman company, and his energy as well as his singing contribute much to the success of the performance. His Leopoldo, revolutionist in a banana republic where revolutions are as common as the chills and fever, is very busy young gentleman throughout the whole of two acts.

Over the course of the twentieth century, banana republic generalized. It can now be applied anywhere in the world to a country with a corrupt and dictatorial regime that is beholden to corporate interests and for whom the rule of law is only a facade.

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Sources:

Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter). “The Admiral.” Of Cabbages and Kings. New York: A.L. Burt, 1904, 132. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Joy, Al C. “Alcazar Gives Us a Pretty Comedy.” San Francisco Examiner, 8 September 1909, 3. ProQuest.

“No Bombardment of Coast Towns.” Arizona Republican, 9 April 1907, 5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wright, Robin. “Is America Becoming a Banana Republic?” The New Yorker, 4 June 2020.

[Correction: I amended the final paragraph by deleting a historically questionable aside.]

shenanigans

9 June 2020

Shenanigans (it’s usually in the plural nowadays, although early uses are often singular) are trickery or illicit machinations, or pranks and light-hearted deceptions. The origin is unknown. It arises in U.S. slang in the mid nineteenth century.

The earliest citation that I have found is from 10 January 1855 in the Portage County Democrat:

How can an intelligent man say of another, as a politician he is a base, corruptible scoundrel, as a man, a fine, honorable, honest gentleman.

This looks like “shenanigan” to outsiders.

Several of the earliest citations are clustered in California, for example this one from the June 1855 issue of The Pioneer:

It seems that some three years since, Mr. Moon—Mr. John Moon, “Professor,” as he is styled in his bills, “Professor of Dexterity and Optical Deceptions, Fellow of the Mystic Lodge of Arts, London,” now one of the “Ethiopian Fakir Troupe” performing at the San Francisco Theater [...] An individual from “Pike County,” who had attended several evening and witnessed the “experiment,” suspected, in the classic language of the times, that there was something of “shenanigan” in it.

The quotation marks around both of these uses indicate that the term was new, at least to the editors. So, if antedatings are found, they are not likely to be much older than 1855.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang speculates on two possible origins. It could be from the Irish sionnach, meaning literally a fox but could be used metaphorically to refer to trickery or hiding, or it might be from the East Anglian dialectal nannicking, meaning fooling around or playing the fool. Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary defines nannick as “to play the fool; to play when one should be working; to idle away one’s time; to fidget.” And it defines nannicking as “full of apish tricks; trifling.” It isn’t far-fetched to think a phrase like is nannicking might become shenanigan. But these are just guesses, with no evidence behind either.

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Sources:

“Editor’s Table.” The Pioneer; or, California Monthly Magazine, June 1855, 374. ProQuest.

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

“Our Correspondence.” Portage County Democrat (Ravenna, Ohio), 10 January 1855, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

Wright, Joseph. The English Dialect Dictionary, vol 4 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, 225.

kettling

Police kettle protestors at the Bishopsgate Climate Camp, London, 1 April 2009

8 June 2020 (Updated, 3 pm, 8 June)

Kettling is a police tactic for controlling and shutting down demonstrations. The name arises from a German hunting and World War II army tactic.

The Guardian, on 2 April 2009, defined kettling:

Kettling is the word used to describe the police tactic of corralling demonstrators into a space for several hours. Public order officers say it is used to contain and close down marches when they get violent. But its legality has been challenged over claims that it restricts an individual's human rights and stops the right to peacefully protest. So far, legal challenges have resulted in the use of kettling being upheld by the courts.

The name comes from the metaphor of a kettle being a container where boiling liquids can be safely handled. The word kettle, meaning the cooking vessel, goes back to the Old English cytel and has cognates in several Germanic languages, including Kessel in German.

The police jargon term appears to have originated as a hunting term in Germany. Kesseltrieben, literally kettle-driving, refers to the practice of driving game into an enclosed circle where they can be killed. That term is attested to by 1870. Kesseljagen, literally kettle-hunting, is even older, dating to at least 1682.

The hunting tactic was applied by the Germany military in World War II, and then, in the post-war period, spread to police forces in Germany and then throughout Europe and North America. Time magazine recorded the Wehrmacht tactic of Keil und Kessel on 6 October 1941:

The German Army's favorite tactic is called Keil und Kessel. Keil means wedge: the Army drives tanks and armored vehicles into the enemy mass. Kessel means kettle: infantry units encircle the cut mass, drive it into a kettle-shaped trap. Last week on the Ukraine front the Germans put the heat under the biggest pot o' Russians ever, and had the chock nearly set for a new drive into the apparently endless Red mass beyond.

Kettle. In the deepest encirclement it ever attempted, the German Army had taken in not only Kiev but some 11,000 square miles to the east. Inside that kettle it claimed it had isolated no less than 50 divisions (more than the U.S. Army, two-thirds of the British Army, one-fifth of the German Army).

The police tactic dates to the late 1980s in Germany, although I haven’t yet found the words kettle or Kessel applied to it as a label until the 2000s. There are, however, several uses of the kettle metaphor in describing the tactic. For instance, there is this 7 October 1994 article in Die Zeit detailing a demonstration in East Germany that had occurred on 9 October 1989:

Wir haben Steffi natürlich nicht gefunden. Sie war irgendwo anders im Kessel und ihr blieb erspart, geschlagen oder verhaftet zu werden. [...] Es gibt eine Photographie im stern, auf der man die jungen Leute (zufällig auch unsere Tochter) mit weit aufgerissenen Augen und Kerzen in der Hand direkt vor einer dichten Reihe Polizei und Sperrautos stehen sieht.

(Of course, we didn't find Steffi. She was somewhere else in the kettle and was spared being beaten or arrested. [...] There is a photograph in Der Stern on which you can see the young people (coincidentally also our daughter) standing with wide open eyes and candles in front of a dense line of police and blocking cars.)

And there is this from Die Zeit on 25 February 1999 that doesn’t describe the police tactic but does use the metaphor of a boiling kettle to describe a demonstration:

Recht behalten haben aber auch die Hamburger und Stuttgarter Behörden. Sie genehmigten Demonstrationen, um Dampf aus dem Kessel zu lassen und den Protest besser kontrollieren zu können. Anders als in Berlin blieb es dort friedlich.

(The Hamburg and Stuttgart authorities have also been right. They approved demonstrations to let steam out of the kettle and better control the protest. Unlike in Berlin, it remained peaceful there.)

The earliest uses of kettling as a label for the police tactic that I have been able to find are in reference to the protests at the G20 summit in London on 1 April 2009. The term is undoubtedly older in police jargon but doesn’t appear to have caught the notice of journalists until this date. In addition to the definition quoted above, there is this from a different Guardian article on 2 April 2009:

They used familiar tactics to trap 4,000 people into streets outside the Bank of England in a practice known as "kettling", tightening the cordon when violence flared in one part of Threadneedle Street and a group of protesters, whose faces were covered, broke into the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Commander Bob Broadhurst, in charge of the operation, said his aim was to facilitate peaceful protest. But those peaceful demonstrators caught inside the cordon with no toilet facilities, and little water, questioned the idea that they were being allowed to exercise their right to march.

"The police should let us dribble out when we need to," said June Rogers, a gardener from south London. "We've just come on a peaceful protest. We've got fire in our belly and we want to say something and be heard, we are just ordinary people but they made the situation worse."

Jeannie Mackie, a barrister who had attended the climate camp as an observer, was penned in for two hours after police cordoned off both ends of Bishopsgate.

"I thought it was completely unnecessary," she said.

"I was kept for two hours. Lines of police lined up with their batons and they were completely pumped up and looking to have a go. My feeling was everyone in there was peaceful but they wanted to clear them out." Responding to the police use of the kettling technique she said that although the courts had ruled that it was legal, there had to be a good reason. "I asked one officer could I go and he said no—I might go and cause trouble. I giggled and said that wasn't very likely and he said, 'you can never tell with these people'."

Since 2009, the term appears numerous times in news articles from around the world. But perhaps using the name of a hunting term turned into a Nazi military maneuver as a label for a twenty-first century police tactic isn’t the best public relations move.

[I’ve updated the original with the references to the older German hunting practice.]

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Sources:

Brewer, W. “Kettling.” ADS-L ,8 June 2020.

“Chock and Pot.” Time, 6 October 1941, 28.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. cytel.

“G20: Protestors: In the Kettle.” The Guardian, 2 April 2009, 3. ProQuest.

Klingst, Martin. “Maß halten!” Zeit Online, 25 February 1999.

Kluge, Friedrich, et al. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, seventeenth edition. Berlin: W. de Grruyter, 1957, 364–65. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Meikle, James and Sandra Laville. “‘Bottles Thrown’ as Man Lay Dying.” The Guardian, 2 April 2009, 1, ProQuest.

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

Reich, Jens. “Ohne Furcht vor den Herrschenden.” Zeit Online, 7 October 1994.

Photo credit: Charlotte Gilhooly, 2009, Wikimedia, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Thanks to Susan Conklin Akbari for discovering the 1941 Time article.

curfew / sundown town

Kansas City, Missouri sign indicating a nighttime curfew is in effect for minors, 2013

8 June 2020

A curfew is a law or regulation requiring that people be off the streets at a certain hour. Curfews can be either temporary or permanent, and they can apply to everyone or only to certain categories of people.

The word, like many English legal terms, comes from Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken in England following the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman coeverfeu, a compound of couvre (imperative form, to cover) + feu (fire), an order that fires should be banked and lights extinguished. The word also applied to the tolling of bells that signaled the start of the curfew. The French word appears in the 1285 Statutes for the City of London:

Defendu est qe nul seit si hardi estre trove alaunt ne wacraunt par my les Ruwes de la Citee, apres Coeverfu persone a Seint Martyn le grant a Espeye ne a Bokuyler ne a autre arme pur mal fere, ne dount mal supecion poet avenir; ne en autre manere nule, sil ne seit grant Seignour ou altre prodome de bone conysaunce, ou lour certeyn message qi de els serra garaunty qe vount li un a lautre pur conduyte de Lumere.

(It is ordered that none be so brazen as to be found going or wandering about the streets of the city, after curfew has been tolled at St. Martins le Grand, with sword or buckler, or other arms for doing harm, or whereof evil suspicion might arise; nor any in any other manner, unless he be a great lord or other lawful person of good repute, or their certain messenger, having their warrants to go from one to another, with lantern in hand.)

Curfew appears in English by c. 1330 when it is used in the poem The Seven Sages of Rome, found in the Auchinleck Manuscript, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1:

Þan was þe lawe in Rome town,
Þat wheþer lord or garsoun,
Þat after corfu bi founde rominde
Faste men schoulden hem nimen and binde
And kepen him til þe sonne vprising,
And þan bifore þe fo[l]k him bring
And þourgh toun him villiche driue.

(Then was the law in Rome town,
That [anyone] whether a lord or servant,
Who is found roaming after curfew
That men should quickly take and bind him
And keep him until the sun’s rising,
And then bring him before the people
And drive him humiliatingly through town.)

The basic meaning of curfew hasn’t changed since the medieval period, except that we no longer ring bells to announce its start. But while the meaning hasn’t changed, the word has gained an additional connotation in the American context. During the Jim Crow era, it was a common practice for municipalities to impose curfews on Blacks, requiring them to be off the streets or to even leave the city limits by a certain time, usually at sundown.

The term sundown town, denoting a municipality where Blacks were not welcome after dark, appears by 1936, when it appears in Janet Seville’s Like a Spreading Tree:

Few realize, too, that the “sundown” towns of white faces were a Negro may not be found after dark with safety are matched by Negro towns, South and North, where a white face is a novelty.

Even older is the phrase don’t let the sun go down (or set) on you. It appears by the 1890s. The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from the McKinney, Texas Democrat of 25 April 1895 that reads:

“Don't let the sun go down on you here to-morrow negro. Yours truly, White Caps.” This note [...] penned on the tent of some negroes.

Cap here refers to well capper, an oil field worker. I have not found a copy of the Democrat of that date to determine the wider context. But I did find a remarkably similar example from the Dallas Morning News of 13 May 1897 referring to the town of Savoy in central Texas after a group of black workers were hired to replace striking white workers. I don’t know if these are two separate incidents or if the OED got the date wrong:

Last night a miniature coffin was placed in the yard of their quarters. The coffin contained a hangman’s knot, some cartridges and the following note:

“Colored section boys: Don’t let the sun go down on you here Saturday night. If you do this is your fate. You give us the dodge Sunday night or you would have come up missing, so we will give you until Saturday night to leave. If you let the sun go down on you Saturday night here you will go to h—ll a glimmering. Bill and Caleb will get the same thing if they keep your any other n[——]rs any longer. We Will be there Saturday or Sunday night, so be prepared.

OLD TIME WHITECAPS.”

The parties committing the depredations are not known, but the whole affair is regarded with disapproval by the best element of the community.

And this report about Port Arthur, Texas appeared in the Detroit Free Press of 4 September 1901:

Not far from Beaumont there is a place called Port Arthur, which is settled by many people from Michigan, but particularly from the New England States, and soon after the town was established, a sign was found there reading: “N[——]r, don’t let the sun go down on you in Port Arthur.” There was considerable comfort in that sign for us southerners.

[The expurgation of hell is in the original, but the elisions of the N-word in these quotations are mine. The unexpurgated word appears in the original articles.]

So, the implementation of a curfew in the United States, even if not explicitly targeted at Blacks, carries with it a considerable amount of racist baggage.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2006, s.v. coverfeu.

Brunner, Karl, ed. The Seven Sages of Rome (Southern Version). Early English Text Society, O.S. 191. London: Oxford UP, 1933, 60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Getting Rich in Texas.” Detroit Free Press, 4 September 1901, 5. ProQuest.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. curfeu n.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, s.v. sundown, n., sun, n.1.

Seville, Janet E. Like a Spreading Tree: The Presbyterian Church and the Negro. New York: Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1936, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Statutes for the City of London” (1285). The Statutes of the Realm (1810), vol 1 of 11. London: Dawsons, 1965, 102. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“White Cappers’ Work.” Dallas Morning News, 13 May 1897, 1. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Paul Sableman, 2013, Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.