bump / bumper crop

18 June 2020

A good harvest is known as a bumper crop. But why? What does a bumper have to do with agriculture? Tracing the term’s origin follows a rather long path through the last five hundred years, from pustules on the body to drinking songs, but it’s one of fairly typical semantic development.

The root is bump, which appears in the first half of the sixteenth century and is probably echoic in origin, imitating the sound of a collision. It is, in this way, akin to lump (a. 1300) and thump (1552). It first appears in the sense of a protuberance or lump in Thomas Paynell’s 1533 translation of De Morbo Gallico, where it translates the Latin sinus, meaning curve or fold:

For Guaiacum doth resolue and destroy meruaylously swellynges ge∣therynges to gether of yll matters, hard∣nesses bumpis, and knobbes.

It also appears in John Florio’s 1598 A Worlde of Words, an early Italian-English dictionary, in the definition for the Italian quosi:

Quosi, red pimples, bumbs or pearles in ones face.

And Shakespeare used the noun bump in Romeo and Juliet, written during the 1590s. Here is the Nurse, in Act 1, Scene 3, recalling how as a toddler Juliet fell and hit her head, from the 1623 First Folio version:

And yet, I warrant, it had vpon it brow a bumpe as big as a young Cockrel’s stone? A perilous knock, and it cryed bitterly. Yea quoth my husband, fall’st vpon thy face, thou wilt fall backward when thou commest to age: wilt thou not, Iule? It stinted: and said I.

This passage is preceded by a discussion of how Juliet, at thirteen, is now of marriageable age, so the falling backward is foreshadowing her falling into bed, on her back, with Romeo.

The verb to bump, meaning to collide or strike, appears in the record after the noun, but this is probably due to the paucity of surviving texts from the era. Logically, the verb should come first, and it probably did, but the earliest surviving use I’m aware of is from Thomas Phaer’s 1558 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. In this passage, from Book 5, he describes the boxing match between Entellus and Dares:

With thondringes thompyng thick, and wery Dares wretche on soyle
With both his armes he bumpes, and upside down doth toss and toyle.
Than lord Eneas wold no longer wrath in them fret,
Nor more Entellus bitter mood on rage he wold haue set.
But end of fighting made, and tyered Dares up did take,
And soft with gentill speche in comfort thus to him he spake.

In the mid sixteenth century we also see the adjective bumping with the sense of growing in size. The existence of the adjective implies the existence of a verb to bump with the sense of to grow in size. From Thomas Nuce’s 1566 translation of Seneca’s Octavia, in a passage describing the sun:

Than which in all the worlde, nothing besyde,
Of all this huge and endlesse worke, the guyde,
More wondrous, nature, framde that I espyde.
For all the bumping bygnesse it doth beare,
Yet waxing olde is like againe to weare,
And to be chaungde to an vnwyldie lumpe.

And, indeed, we see the verb meaning to grow in size in print about a decade later. From a passage about the maple tree in John Gerade’s 1577 The Herball:

The flowers hang by clusters, of a whitish greene colour; after them commeth up long fruite fastened togither by couples, one right against another, with kernels bumping out neere to the place in which they are combined.

By the 1670s we start to see bumper being used to mean a cup that is filled to overflowing. This use first appears, unsurprisingly, in drinking songs. From the 1670 ditty “Mark Noble’s Frollick”:

Sweet Bacchus in Bumpers were flowing,
which Liquor all mortal Men chears,
And now after all I am going,
where you dare not come for your Ears.

Also from 1670 is “The Saint Turn’d Sinner,” a song making fun of dissenters, that is non-Anglican Christians, such as Quakers:

A Gospel Cushion thumper,
Who dearly lov'd a Bumper,
And something else beside Sir,
If he is not bely'd Sir,
This was a holy Guide Sir,
For the Dissenting Train.

And yet another. This one is the chorus to the 1676 song “Gallantry All-A-Mode”:

Cho. Let Bumpers go round,
Let Bumpers go round,
Whilst thus double armed we stand to our ground,
And the dull Rogue that dare,
Bawk his Liquor and spare;
Kick him out,
Kick him out,
Whilst Bumpers go round.

So, it’s no surprise that bumper would acquire the sense of abundance or greatness in size. By the mid eighteenth century we get this note of bumper being used in colloquial speech in exactly this sense. From the Gentleman’s Magazine of June 1759:

I would observe next, that in some of the midland counties, any thing large is called a bumper, as a large apple or pear; hence bumping lass is a large girl of her age, and a bumpkin is a large limbed uncivilized rustic.

And finally, by 1836 we get the phrase bumper crop itself appearing. From an item in the Kelso Mail from 15 August 1836 reprinted in the Scotsman two days later:

Grouse-shooting commenced on Friday, and from all we have been able to learn from the moors in our own vicinity, the birds have seldom keen [sic] known to be so strong and numerous; they are, in fact, a bumper crop, and the sport has, in consequence, been excellent.

So, there you have it. A gradual, step-by-step process of semantic change.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Florio, John. A Worlde of Words, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English. London: Arnold Hatfield, 1598, 307. Early English Books Online.

“Gallantry All-A-Mode.” London: F. Coles, c. 1676. Early English Books Online.

Gemsage, Paul. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 29, June 1759, 270–72.

Gerarde, John. The Herball. London: John Norton, 1577, 1299.

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

“Mark Noble’s Frollick.” London: B. Deacon, 1670. Early English Books Online.

Nuce, Thomas. The Ninth Tragedie of Lucius Anneus Seneca called Octauia. London: Henry Denham, 1566, sig. D.ii.verso. Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. bumper, n.1 and adj., bumping, adj., bump, n.2, bumb, n.

Paynell, Thomas, translation of Ulrich von Hutten’s De Morbo Gallico. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1533, fol. 62v. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership.

Phaer, Thomas. The Seven First Bookes of the Eneidos of Virgill. London: John Kingston, 1558, v. sig. P.iii. Early English Books Online.

“The Saint Turn'd Sinner; or, The Dissenting Parson's Text Under the Quaker's Petticoats.” London: N. Palmer, 1670. Early English Books Online.

The Scotsman, 17 August 1836, 3.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. First Folio Text, 1623. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68, 56.

bull & bear markets

“Charging Bull,” a statue by Arthur Di Modica located in the financial district of New York City, March 2020

17 June 2020

When the stock market is rising and the prices of stocks generally are going up, we call it a bull market. When it’s going down, it’s a bear market. But why do we associate bulls and bears with financial markets?

The literal senses of bull and bear, referring to the animals, have fairly straightforward etymologies. The form bull first appears c. 1175 in the Ormulum (Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 1):

Forr bule lateþþ modiliᵹ & bereþþ upp hiss hæfedd.

(For the bull acts proudly and bears up his head.)

The Ormulum, a work of biblical exegesis, was composed and copied in Lincolnshire, an area that had been under the Danelaw—the area of England ruled by the Vikings during the ninth and tenth centuries—and the work contains numerous words and phrases of Old Norse origin. The title, in fact, is from the Old Norse orm, meaning worm or dragon, and was the name of the author, Ormin, a common name in the area. It is thought that bull may, therefore, be from the Old Norse bole. But the root is found in many Germanic languages, and Old English has bulluc, the source of the present-day bullock, as seen in an Old English gloss of the Latin Liber scintillarum (Book of Sparks), a collection of maxims and adages:

Salomon dixit melius est uocare ad olera cum caritate quam ad uitulum saginatum cum odio.

betere ys geclypian to wyrtum mid soðre lufe þænne to bulluce gemæstum mid hatunge.

([Solomon said] it is better to call for herbs with true love than for the fatted bullock with hatred.)

Bulluce here glosses the Latin vitula, or calf. So, bull may instead be from an unattested Old English root *bulla. Or it could be from both that and the Old Norse word. In any case, it’s from a Proto-Germanic root.

Bear is even more straightforward. It comes down to us from the Old English bera. From the poem Maxims II:

Cyning sceal on healle beagas dælan.
Bera sceal on hæðe, eald and egesfull.
Ea of dune sceal flodgræg feran.

(A king in his hall must deal out rings.
A bear on the heath must be full-grown and fearsome.
A river must flow downward, flood-gray.)

But compared to the literal meaning of the words, their association with speculative ventures is relatively recent. This association goes back to the sixteenth century and the reign of Elizabeth I and an adage warning not to sell the bear skin before one has caught the bear—akin to the present-day adage of don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. The adage appears in a 1567 letter from Nicholas Throckmorton to William Cecil in which Throckmorton opined on the possibility of granting some liberty to Mary, Queen of Scots and on whether they could seize the property of her husband, Lord Bothwell. Bothwell had been accused of murdering Mary’s previous husband, Lord Darnley, and had fled the country. It’s clear from the letter that the phrase was one already in use:

For my demand for her [i.e., Mary, Queen of Scots] enlargement: the lords could not resolve, as it “depended upon accydentes: ‘Albert’ (sayd he) ‘for myne own parte, I coulde be contented yt weere undelayedlye.’” To my demand for her “condycion and estate after Bodwells apprehencion and justefyinge”: he aunswered ‘That theye coulde not marchaundyze for the beares skynne before they had hym’!

It also appears in a 1577 translation of Francis de De Lisle’s A Legendarie:

These two good commissioners being arriued in Scotland, began in their owne fancies to make partition of the gentlemens lands, and selling the beares skinne which yet they had not taken.

Shakespeare even uses a variation on the phrase in Henry V, 4.3, written c. 1600. The king addresses the French herald who has come seeking the English surrender just prior to the Battle of Agincourt:

I pray thee beare my former Answer back:
Bid them atchieue me, and then sell my bones.
Good God, why should they mock poore fellowes thus?
The man that once did sell the Lyons skin
While the beast liu’d, was kill’d with hunting him.

Here Shakespeare is taking a phrase that would be familiar to the audience and changing the bear to a lion, to make it more fitting for the royal Henry.

Up to now, bearskin was simply associated with prematurely forecasting success in some venture, but in the opening years of the eighteenth century it became associated with the stock market. In financial markets it referred to what we now call selling short or shorting an investment. That is, selling a security that one does not yet own at today’s price for delivery at a later date, with the expectation that the price will fall in the meantime, allowing one to purchase the stock prior to delivery at a lower price and thus making a profit.

Bearskin was used by many writers, as a derogatory term and in arguments for financial reforms. Notably, Daniel Defoe was particularly fond of the metaphor. One such early use is from Defoe’s 1705 Dyet of Poland:

For Bear-Skin Places, Chaffers with the State,
Secures the Cash, and leaves the rest to Fate;
Enricht with Fraud, in Trick, and Cheat grown Old,
And Places Bought on purpose to be Sold.

Another poet that uses the phrase is Arthur Maynwaring, in his 1714 satire “Prologue”:

Our Satyr falls
On such alone as Sin with the Walls.
The Bearskin Merchants are the Men we rally,
And leave good Covent-Garden for Change-Alley;
Where Sober Cit to bite his Bubbles comes,
And gets by Paper, and false News, his Plumbs.
Where Widows weep, and Orphans sue in vane,
The Miser thinks of Nothing but the Chain;
And All is Honest, All is Fair, that’s gain.

And there is Defoe again; this time in his 1719 The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley:

Then let you Citizens of London have a care of a Bearskin-Court, and a Stock-Jobbing Ministry, when Exchange-Alley shall be transpos’d to the Exchequer, and the States-men shall make a Property of the Brokers.

There is also News from Hell, written by a Mr. Chamberlen in 1721 after the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, which ruined the British economy:

Then Merchants did not seek each other’s Fall,
Nor sell the Bearskin, or for Premiums call,
But from abroad their well-got Riches brought,
In Ships with Spices, and with Diamonds fraught.

And Defoe again, creating a fictional account book in his 1727 The Complete English Tradesman:

By Tim. Bearskin for 500 1. S. Sea Stock, transferred to me this day at 117½

Finally, we have this from November 1763 in The St. James Magazine:

Some mischeif, to one’s utter ruin:
Contriving, scratching their dull pates,
To chouse men out of whole estates;
Selling the bearskin; making bargains
Of several pounds: yet han’t three farthings,
They want a thorough reformation:
Make me some small consideration,
And let the pillory keep its station.

By 1718 we also see the plain bear to refer to someone who shorts an investment, as well as the use of bull to refer to someone who goes long on an investment (i.e., speculates that the price will rise). From Susanna Centlivre’s 1718 play A Bold Stroke for a Wife:

SECOND STOCKBROKER:            Are you a Bull or a Bear to day, Abraham?
THIRD STOCKBROKER:                A Bull, faith,—but I have good Putt for next Week.

This sense of bull develops simply as an alliterative counterpart to bear and bearskin. Two powerful animals beginning with the letter < b > representing powerful and competing market forces.

So, in the eighteenth century an old Elizabethan maxim was transformed into the bulls and bears of the financial markets that we know today.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Centlivre, Susanna. A Bold Stroke for a Wife. London: W. Mears, 1718, 36.

Chamberlen. News from Hell: or a Match for the Di[recto]rs. London, 1721, 2. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Defoe, Daniel. The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley. London: E. Smith, 1719, 61. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

———. The Complete English Tradesman, second edition. London: Charles Rivington, 1727, 49. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

———. The Dyet of Poland. London, 1705, 50. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

de Lisle, Francis. A Legendarie Conteining an Ample Discovrse of the Life and Behauiour of Charles Cardinal of Lorraine, and of His Brethren, of the House of Guise. (translation from French). 1577, E.viii.

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

Lloyd, Robert. The St. James Magazine, vol. 3. London: G. Kearsly, 1764, November 1763 issue, 161. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Maynwaring, Arthur. “Prologue.” Original Poems and Translations. By Several Hands. London: Benjamin Bragg, 1714, 46. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. (This edition is anonymous, but Maynwaring is credited with the poem in a 1715 collection of his works.)

Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2018, s.v. bole, n.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bull, n.1 with 1993 draft additions; bullock, n.

———, third edition, September 2009, s.v. skin, n.; March 2020, s.v. bear, n.1, bearskin, n.

Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fift. First Folio Text, 1623. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22273 Fo.1 no.05, 87.

Throckmorton, Nicolas. Letter to William Cecil, 1 September 1567. In Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547–1603, vol. 2, 1563–1569, Joseph Bain, editor. Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1900, 392.

Photo credit: Arthur Henkelman, March 2020, Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

Bob's your uncle

4 June 2020 (updated 15 June 2020)

Bob’s Your Uncle is a British expression meaning everything will be all right, everything is arranged, no worries. Alas, the identity of Bob is unknown, and the early record of the phrase is sketchy, affording few clues as to its origin.

The website Wordhistories.net  reports an early, isolated appearance in the East Aberdeenshire Observer (Peterhead, Scotland) from 12 November 1891. I have not been able to independently verify its accuracy. That website reports the paper as saying:

Teetotalers, as a rule, are always to be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. The very principle—if principle it can be called—which differentiates them from the great mass of ordinary humanity, proves that there is a specially weak point in their natures, that they are morally and mentally lop-sided, and therefore “worth the watching.” It is a relief to know that the lop-sided Feuars will be well watched while Bailie Ross sits at the Board, and to him I with confidence address the counsel “Go it as you have begun! Bob’s yer Uncle!”

If this quotation is accurate and dated correctly (I have no reason to think it isn’t; I just am unable to check), it pushes the date of the phrase somewhat earlier but still gives us no clue as to its origin.

The oldest use that I have found for the phrase is in a song title. Unfortunately, the songwriter and the lyrics are unknown. All I have is a reference to the song in a 1923 advertisement by the Herman Darewski Music Publishing Company that appears in the British publication The Stage:

New Songs.
You May Have Some Loving But You Can’t Have It All
Dearest You’re the Nearest to My Heart
Forever                     Tomahawk Blues
Trifling                        Bobs Your Uncle

The phrase next appears in a series of June 1924 advertisements for a theatrical revue that was appearing in a Dundee, Scotland theater. The ad for 19 June 1924 reads:

VICTORIA THEATRE
6.50—Twice Nightly.—8.50
The Great Comedy Revue
BOB’S YOUR UNCLE

Unfortunately, there is no information about this performance other than the title. Whether or not it is related to the song advertised the previous year is unknown.

About ten years later, a song of that title turns up again. This time it is performed by Leslie Sarony and Leslie Holmes, an act billed as The Two Leslies. A review of their act that appears in the Hull Daily Mail on 22 January 1935 reads:

Song writers may be numerous; "hit"-song writers are not so numerous; and songster-"hit"-song-writers are but few.  Of the latter class are these Leslies, writing all their own material, and scoring "hits" nearly all the time.  Think of "Rhymes," "Tweet, tweet," "Ain't it grand to be blooming-well dead?" "The Old Sow," "Wheezy Anna"-and wait for "Try" and "Bob's Your Uncle" (this last title will eclipse all the rest).

Sarony, in particular, became rather well known, but I can find no other mention of a song titled Bob’s Your Uncle by him. It could be the same song advertised in 1923, and Sarony could have been one of the writers and performers of the 1924 revue of that title, but we simply don’t know. The parenthetical comment about the song eclipsing the others hints that it might have been a hit, but the lack of information about the song, including the lack of extant lyrics, militates against it being well known.

These early musical titles tell us that the phrase was circulating in the 1920s, but they don’t give us any information about how it was used, what it meant, or what its origin is. There are later songs of that title or that use the phrase in their lyrics, as well.

The earliest extant use that gives us an idea of how the phrase was used is in a personal advertisement taken out by a litigant who had won a civil lawsuit. From the Essex Newsman of 3 March 1928:

Mr. A.H. Solder (Bob’s your Uncle) wishes to THANK all good friends for their congratulations on his successfully defending the action in the High Courts this week.

It’s a bit cryptic, but by using it Solder seems to be saying that the matter is settled, everything is good. Another instance that conveys the same sparse information comes from the world of horseracing. In November 1932, a horse name Bob won the Epsom Derby Cup, prompting a sportswriter to say:

It was a case of “Bob’s your uncle” at Derby yesterday, for the three-year-old of that name put up a splendid performance to win the Derby Cup.

Clearly this is a play on the existing phrase and the name of the horse.

A few years later we get an account of it being used in speech, by a man arrested for drunk driving, as reported by the Essex Chronicle on 11 December 1936:

Witness [i.e., Police Constable McKenna] asked him if he had a friend with him to drive the car, and he replied: “Yes, no, I don’t know where my friends are, do you? What’s the matter? Let’s have a drink.”

Witness continued: He then patted me on the cheek and said, “I have been a naughty boy. Had one over the eight. Not so bad Bob’s your uncle.”

Finally, we get a clear sense of how Bob’s your uncle is used in a 1937 account of a man describing how easy he has it at work. From the Yorkshire Evening Post, 11 January 1937:

“So long as you behave yourself, nurse your congregation, say a few commonplace and trite things to your folk every week, Bob's your uncle.” For the moment I could not recall an avuncular Robert, but I knew what my acquaintance meant.

So, from these early uses we understand how the phrase was used and that it was in use in the 1920s, but we still have no idea who Bob is. If we had the lyrics to the 1923 song, that might point the way—that song might even be the origin. But we don’t have them, and the fact that we don’t hints that the song, as well as Sarony’s 1935 song (if they aren’t one and the same), wasn’t all that popular and is thus unlikely to have been the origin.

Where does it come from? The most likely explanation, although one that is by no means certain, is that it is a play on an older slang phrase all is bob, meaning all is well. This use appears as early as 1699 in a slang dictionary:

It’s all bob, c. all is safe, the bet is secured

The problem with this explanation is that this use of bob or all is bob seems to die out around 1850. The gap in recorded coverage is such that those who were likely to have used Bob’s your uncle in the 1920s, wouldn’t have been alive long enough to remember the older slang expression.

Another explanation that is commonly proffered is that the phrase relates to Robert Cecil, the third marquess of Salisbury, and his nephew Arthur Balfour. The younger man rose through party and government ranks while his uncle was prime minister, creating rumblings of nepotism. The dates are right for this. Balfour was appointed Secretary for Scotland in 1886 and as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887, while his uncle was prime minister. He then succeeded his uncle as prime minister in 1902. But other than it being chronologically possible, we have no evidence that the phrase is indeed linked to Cecil and Balfour, and the explanation bears all the marks of an after-the-fact justification rather than a true origin.

Discuss this post

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[On 15 June 2020 I added the 1891 citation.]

Sources:

Advertisement. Evening Telegraph (Dundee, Scotland). 19 June 1924.

“Allegations Against a Chelmsford Motorist.” Essex Chronicle (Chelmsford, England), 11 December 1936, 4.

Baker, John. “Bob’s Your Uncle: Antedating and History.” American Dialect Society Mailing List (ADS-L), 25 August 2014.

B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, 1699. Early English Books Online.

“Bob’s Your Uncle” (personal advertisement). Essex Newsman (Chelmsford, England). 3 March 1928, 1.

The Ferret. “Careful Sailor Good To-Day.” Courier and Advertiser (Dundee, Scotland). 19 November 1932, 7.

Goranson, Stephan. “Bob’s your Uncle antedated (?) to 1928, 1929...” American Dialect Society Mailing List (ADS-L), 5 July 2012.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bob’s your uncle phr., bob adj.

Herman Darewski Music Publishing, Advertisement, The Stage, 11 January 1923, 2.182, 28.

“Tivoli—Variety.” Daily Mail (Hull, England), 22 January 1935, 5.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Meaning, Origin, and History of ‘Bob’s Your Uncle.’” Wordhistories.net. 4 June 2018.

microaggression

15 June 2020

A microaggression is a subtle, often unintentional, action that exhibits a prejudice or discriminates against a marginalized minority. Microaggressions may be minor, almost unnoticeable, slights, and a single or even a few instances may be insignificant. But when they are experienced daily over the course of years, or even a lifetime, the psychic toll on a person can be great.

While microaggressions are sociologically important, in many ways the word is linguistically uninteresting. For instance, its origin is unexceptional, a compound of the combining form micro- + aggression.

But the word does have two distinguishing features. The first is that we can pinpoint exactly who coined it and when, and the second is that it is an excellent example of what linguist Arnold Zwicky calls the recency illusion, the belief that a word or phrase that you have just noticed for the first time is genuinely new, when in fact it has been around for a long time, in this case some fifty years.

To those points, it was coined by Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in F. B. Barbour’s 1970 The Black Seventies:

Hence the therapist is obliged to pose the idea that offensive mechanisms are usually a micro-aggression, as opposed to a gross, dramatic, obvious macro-aggression such as lynching.

Most terms or new usages arise in casual usage, and their very first uses go unrecorded. It’s not until sometime later, sometimes years, that they actually see print. Exceptions to this are often scientific and technical terms, where researchers are often careful to call out new terms that they use. This is one of these latter cases. And indeed, microaggression remained restricted to psychiatric and psychological literature for many years.

It’s not until seventeen years after Pierce coined it that microaggression appears in a mainstream publication, in this case, the Chicago Tribune of 15 September 1987. This usage is also useful in that it gives several practical examples of what constitutes a microaggression. But this example still refers to Pierce and his research, showing that the term had yet to become familiar to a broader audience:

Leon Boyd stepped into a CTA bus on his way to work on the North Side and discovered that he was being transformed into a monster.

At first, Boyd said, the symptoms were subtle.

"I would catch them glancing out of the corner of their eyes, looking at me," Boyd said of nervous passengers.

"They practically crammed themselves into the seat not to touch me. Then they'd adjust their bags and purses or draw their purses tight around their arms."

[...]

A study by Chester Pierce, a professor of education at Harvard University, suggests that episodes similar to those described by Boyd occur routinely. Labeling the phenomenon "microaggression and microinsult," Pierce demonstrated through experiments that black men often are mistreated and stigmatized in public by whites.

By 1992, microaggression could be used without reference to psychiatrists or psychological literature, as in this article from the Philadelphia Tribune on 15 October 1993 about rapper MC Lyte:

Lyte sings: "...doing 80 by funeral mourners—showing little respect—now that's a ruffneck." But notice that Lyte said "showing little respect," not no respect.

Nevertheless, her ruffneck still falls outside the bounds of conventional social respectability. But is it possible that our world of so-called social respectability is itself infested with levels of microaggression, microinsanity and micro-dysfunctionality glossed over and hidden by the societal tendency to highlight the adaptive "brutality" and coarseness of a ruffneck/gangsta b----? And is "brutality" a biological trait? Or is "brutality" a social construct used to label, misinform and consequently render a certain group worthless and hopeless?

The Philadelphia Tribune is an African-American newspaper, which indicates that, as one might expect from its definition, microaggression made inroads into the Black community first, while white America remained largely oblivious to it. And indeed, neither the Corpus of Contemporary American English or the News on the Web Corpus contain examples of the word until 2012, indicating that it was vanishingly rare in mainstream publications and websites until this past decade, some forty years after it was coined.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Blake, John. “Miscast ‘Monsters’ of the Streets: Skin Color Makes These Men into Magnets of Fear and Scorn.” Chicago Tribune, 15 September 1987, D1. ProQuest.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): One billion words, 1990-2019.

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 10 billion words from 20 countries, updated every day.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2018, s.v. microaggression, n.

Yancy, George. “Behind the ‘Gangsta.’” Philadelphia Tribune, 15 October 1993, 7A. ProQuest.

Buckley's chance

14 June 2020

Buckley’s chance is Australian and New Zealand slang meaning no chance at all. The origin of the phrase is unknown, other than the fact that it had its start in Australia. But there are two plausible explanations that have been put forward. Unfortunately, the early evidence of use, as is often the case with slang, is sketchy and doesn’t help us determine who Buckley was or why he had had little hope of succeeding.

The earliest use of the phrase that I know of is as the name of a racehorse. From a New South Wales newspaper of 27 March 1872:

IVANHOE RACES
Saturday, 16th March, 1872.
The following are the results of the above races: —
Maiden Plate, £5, l½ mile. — Buckley's Chance, (Buckley) Bryant's Marmion, McKenna's Win if I can, Mutlow's Modestv.
[...]
On the 18th a Match for £5. — Buckley's Chance, (Buckley) Millard's Turpin, won easily by Chance. Match 1½ miles £10. — Millard's Blondin. (Kennedy) McWiggan's Donkey, won easily by Blondin.

It seems that the horse was owned by someone named Buckley, so we can’t tell if the horse was named for the phrase, or if it was just named Chance and the owner’s name appended to it in order to distinguish it from other horses named Chance. This appearance is more than a decade before the slang phrase indisputably appears, so it’s very possible that it’s unrelated to the phrase. There have been several other racehorses with the name Buckley’s Chance over the years; this appears to be the first.

The first clear use of the slang phrase appears in the context of cricket in the 22 September 1887 issue of the Melbourne Punch:

In our sporting columns, in the Fitzroy team appears the name of Bracken. I should have been BUCKLEY. “Olympus” explains that he altered it because he didn’t want the Fitzroy men to have “Buckley’s chance.” Well, that’ll do. He can score his point this time—a thing he wouldn’t have dreamt of letting him do if he had played the “typographical error” business. In the Fitzroy team the asterisks (*) speak for themselves.

The meaning of Buckley’s chance is clear in the above quotation, but much of the context is obscure, unless you’re an expert in late nineteenth-century, Australian cricket. An example that’s clearer to us today is from a few months later. Again, from the Melbourne Punch, but this time 23 February 1888:

The fielding all round was really excellent, the snavelling of every possible show for a catch being still the feature of the game. Hostilities will be restrained on Saturday; but with only 63 runs to the good, I am afraid the “natty” Ormond have got “Buckley’s chance.” Still, cricket’s a funny game, and equally as much as in horse-racing, you never can tell till the numbers go up.

This use, however, is still marked with quotation marks, indicating that the editors still considered it unusual. But within a few years, the phrase is appearing without italics or quotation marks. From the Daily News (Perth) of 21 March 1892:

He might have sneaked ahead so far in the first mile and a half that they would’nt [sic] have had Buckley’s chance of catching him afterwards.

All of the earliest citations of Buckley’s chance are in sports writing, mostly horseracing and cricket. The earliest non-sporting use I have found is also the earliest from New Zealand. From the New Zealand Observer and Free Lance of 10 September 1892:

Buckley and Nunn storefront in Melbourne (now David Jones)

It is presumed that the defendant’s solicitor was nettled at his successive defeats, for he so far forgot himself as to send the cheque in settlement, which by the way, was for £14 3s instead of £15 6s, to the plaintiff himself instead of to his solicitor. Of course, this meant that had the plaintiff not been a man of good principle his solicitor might have had what is called a “Buckley’s chance” of recovering his fees.

As you can see, these early uses provide no clue as to who was the inspiration for the phrase. Two explanations are commonly proffered; both are plausible but neither has any evidence connecting them to the phrase.

The first is that it was inspired by William Buckley (1780–1856). Buckley was a transportee to Australia who escaped prison and lived for 32 years among the Aborigines in the South Victoria outback. His chances of survival were slim, but he managed to nonetheless.

The second is that the phrase is a pun on the name of the Melbourne retailer Buckley and Nunn, founded 1851. The pun being that someone had two chances, Buckley’s and none. The retail operation is still in existence, but now owned by and operating under the name of David Jones Pty Limited.

And it could come from a combination of these two, with William Buckley supplying the chance and the retailer supplying the none.

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Sources:

“Diamond Cut Diamond.” The New Zealand Observer and Free Lance, 11.715, 10 September 1892, 15.

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

“Ivanhoe Races.” Hay Standard and Advertiser (New South Wales), 27 March 1872, 2.

“The Lady: Chit Chat.” Melbourne Punch. 22 September 1887, 10.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Buckley’s, n.

“Sporting Life.” Melbourne Punch, 23 February 1888, 11.

“Sporting News. The Daily News (Perth), 21 March 1892, 2.

Photo credit: Commander Keane, 2012, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.