busman's holiday

Albert Chevalier in costume as a cockney costermonger, c. 1890

22 June 2020

When I was young, my mother, a community college professor who taught children’s literature among other things, took me to the local public library on a regular basis. One day as we were checking out books, she ran into one of the college librarians and said, “Oh, I see you’re taking a busman’s holiday.” They laughed and chatted a bit, then as we turned back to public librarian to check out our books, the librarian said, “Oh, are you bus drivers?” My mother had then to explain that it was just an expression. For some reason, the incident stuck with me.

So, what is a busman’s holiday? Fortunately, the earliest known use of the phrase also contains an explanation. From an article written by music-hall actor Albert Chevalier in the April 1893 issue of the English Illustrated Magazine:

I shall indeed take a holiday soon, probably on the Continent; but it will be a “Busman’s Holiday.” The bus-driver spends his “day off” in driving on a pal’s bus, on the box-seat by his pal’s side; and I know that night after night, all through my holiday, I shall be in and out of this hall and that theatre, never happy except when I am watching some theatrical piece or Variety entertainment.

Being from 1893, the phrase predates motorized buses, originally referring to the horse-drawn variety.

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Sources:

Chevalier, Albert. “On Costers and Music Halls.” The English Illustrated Magazine,” iss. 115, April 1893, 488.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2012, s.v. busman, n.

Photo credit: brother Bertram Chevalier (brother of subject), U.K. National Portrait Gallery.

minstrel

Sheet music cover for songs by the blackface Christy Minstrels, 1847

21 June 2020

Shameful aspects of history that we like to think are long past us sometimes continue to reverberate today. Such is the case with the word minstrel, which in the American context acquired a racist association whose legacy continues to haunt us.

The word minstrel comes to us from the Medieval Latin ministrallus, meaning an official or lieutenant. It comes from the same root that gives us minister and is recorded in Anglo-Latin texts (i.e., Latin texts written in England) written prior to 1227. By 1266 the Latin word had acquired the sense of a servant, and by 1330 it was being used in the specific sense of a servant who entertained with music or song.

Use of minstrel in English follows the same path, but unusually the English words are recorded before the Anglo-Latin ones. The sense of an official or functionary of a lord appears in the text Ancrene Riwle, a guide for anchoresses, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, written sometime before 1200, with the manuscript from c.1230

Neomeð nu ȝeme of hwucche twa meosters þes twa menestraws seruið hare lauerd, þe deouel of helle.

(Now take heed of these two offices, these two minstrels serve their lord, the devil in hell.)

The sense of a musician or entertainer can be found as early as 1300 in the poem Iacob and Iosep:

Hem oftok a menestral, his harpe he bar arugge.

(He was taken for a minstrel, his harp he bore on his back.)

This medieval sense of minstrel continues to this day, and this usage remains unproblematic. But in the American context, minstrel has become associated with blackface performers, presenting a positive image of slavery in the antebellum American South.

Minstrel was applied to black, often enslaved, performers from early in the nineteenth century. In an 1812 poem supporting abolition of the slave trade, George Dyer refers to black musicians as a minstrel band:

And, hark! I hear a minstrel band.
The negro-slaves, now slaves no more,
Have struck a chord untouch’d before.
Of Afric’s wrongs, and Afric’s pains,
Oft had they sigh’d in lonely strains.

A note in the text says that this poem had been printed “many years before” in the Morning Chronicle, but I have been unable to find this earlier publication.

And a story by a Miss Leslie from January 1832 refers to a black musician as a sable minstrel. Given the story is set in antebellum Virginia, the man and the boy who accompanies him are almost certainly slaves, but the text does not call this fact out:

The two musicians—a black man who played on the violin, and a mulatto-boy with a tambourine [...] he called to the musicians to cease, much to the vexation of the unfashionable portion of the party, and greatly to the discomfiture of the sable minstrel and his assistant, neither of whom, however, could refrain, as the sleigh wafted them along, from giving an occasional scrape on the fiddle, or a thump on the tambourine.

In both of these instances, the word minstrel itself carries no racial implications; it simply means musician. And the 1832 instance has to use the modifier sable to emphasize the musician’s race. But these instances show the chain of semantic association beginning to form. And by 1840, minstrel was being used to refer to white musicians and singers who performed in blackface. Here is a notice of performance by William M. “Billy” Whitlock, a blackface performer in the Atlas from 22 November 1840:

Long island and Old Wirginny Melodies, accompanied on the Banjo, by the inimitable Ethiopian Minstrel, Whitlock.

And there is this 19 December 1842 notice in the New York Herald that mentions Daniel Emmett, the blackface performer who is traditionally claimed to be the composer of Dixie:

Besides the classic performances in the arena this evening, the renowned Ethiopian Minstrel of the South, Mr. Emmit [sic] and his pupil, Master Pierce, will add to the merriment of the occasion.

Blackface minstrelsy would continue to be acceptable to American whites through to the late twentieth century, but it is rightly dead as a continuing tradition of performance.

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Sources:

The Atlas (New York), 22 November 1840, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dyer, George. “Ode 9: On Considering the Unsettled State of Europe, and the Opposition Which Had Been Made to Attempts for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Poetics. London: J. Johnson and Co., 1812, 132. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. ministrallus.

Miss Leslie. “Frank Finlay.” Lady’s Book, January 1832, 53. ProQuest.

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

Napier, Arthur, ed. Iacob and Iosep. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916, 360.

New York Herald, 19 December 1842, 2. ProQuest Civil War Era.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. minstrel, n.

Image credit: Boston Public Library, 2007.

bunk / bunkum

20 June 2020

Bunk or bunkum is nonsense, gobbledygook, double-talk. This word is a case where we’re confident in how it was coined, but the precise details are illusory, probably lost to history. Bunk and bunkum are variants of the name of Buncombe County, North Carolina, and that county became associated with bloviation through its representative to the sixteenth Congress, Felix Walker.

The phrase talking to Bunkum is first recorded in the pages of the Niles Weekly Register in September 1828, and it contains the nub of the story of the term’s origin:

“TALKING TO BUNKUM!” This is an old and common saying at Washington, when a member of congress is making one of those hum-drum and unlistened to “long talks: which have lately become so fashionable—not with the hope of being heard in the house, but to afford an enlightened representative a pretence for sending a copy of his speech to his constituents, the making of many which have been paid for, as a tailor would be for making a coat, or the hatter a hat. We say his speech, for it is just as much so as his hat, and purchased with his money, if not gratuitously manufactured by the hand of a friend. This is cantly called “talking to Bunkum:” an “honorable gentleman” long ago, having said that he was not speaking to the house, but to the people of a certain county in his district, which, in local phrase, he called “Bumkum”. But these are not the only description of persons who “talk to Bunkum”—for the most intelligent and amusing, as well as the most ignorant and foolish members of legislative bodies do it—but the object of both [is] to misrepresent facts.

While this account does a fine job of defining the phrase and gives a general outline of the origin, but it is short on details as to the origin, namely when the speech in Congress occurred and who gave it.

We do have this, however, from the official History of Congress for 25 February 1820 in which Felix Walker gave or attempted to give a speech on the Missouri Question, that is whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted to the union, and if so, whether as a slave state or a free state:

Mr. WALKER, of North Carolina, rose then to address the Committee on the question; but the question was called for so clamorously and so perseveringly that Mr. W. could proceed no farther than to move the Committee rise.

The Committee refused to rise, by almost a unanimous vote.

[Rising is an arcane parliamentary procedure of the House of Representatives. The House can, if it wishes, dissolve into a committee of the whole where rules are relaxed. To rise is to adjourn the committee and return to regular order.]

There is, however, no record of what was actually said. The City of Washington Gazette on 11 May 1820 printed a copy of a speech by Walker on the Missouri Question, but doesn’t specifically indicate when the speech was given, and the text of the speech itself makes no mention of Buncombe or talking to Buncombe. Nor is there a record of the House taking up the Missouri Question in early May. It may be that Walker attempted to give this speech on or about 11 May 1820 and was shouted down because he was out of order, discussing a controversial topic that wasn’t on the agenda. Or it could be that several months after the fact this paper printed the speech that Walker had intended to give in February.

The word bunkum makes its way into American discourse within ten years, and the spelling changed as the original association with Buncombe County was lost. Here is one from The Boston Commercial Gazette of 16 February 1829:

Every one is ignorant of the plans and intentions of the President elect on this subject. The “exclusives,” as the bunkum Jackson democrats are styled by their more moderate partizans, will be sorely disappointed in regard to the distribution of offices under the administration of the old General.

It appears in the Providence Patriot (Rhode Island) on 26 May 1830 in a context far from that of politics:

“My hair is grey—but not with years.”—So says Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon—and so, on Sunday morning last, might have said the whispering woods and the sighing verdure of the fields, having been covered with a beautiful but cold drapery of frost, which was anything but “bunkum.” Vegetation it is tho’t, of some kinds, will be materially injured in the vicinity.

And a few days later it is used without quotation marks or italics in a letter to the editor by one Tom Strickland (more likely it is a letter from the editor) composed in what passes for a rustic dialect. Such dialect was a feature of newspapers of the period (see okay https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/ok-okay). Strickland is writing about a visit by two women collecting money for a battle monument on Bunker Hill:

Now do my dear jist give me five Dollars it will look so queer to se evry bodys name but mine on that long papur I shall feel ashamd cant help it says I I am stif as a moniment yes says one of the wimmin with the long papur and youre hart is as hard as Quincey grannit dont care for that says I I never new but two good things come from Quincy yet, and them the too John Adamses and they wor what I call Bunkum so of they trudged but I heard them tell my wife at the door they would call agin.

Bunkum appears in Britain by 1837, but at first in articles quoting American newspapers. From the Chester Chronicle of 3 March 1837 quoting from the New York Sunday Morning Post, but using the word in an unusual sense:

Young Durivage, the comic actor, writes and speaks as good Yankee as any man on the stage. He headed his benefit bill at Bangor with the following cute phrase:—“Our folks want to know, if your folks’ll come down to-night to see our folks, and fetch all your folks along? All the fellers must put on their yellerest vests and stiffest shirt collars, and fetch all the galls, and I’ll bet a hunk of gingerbread agin a gov of ‘lasses candy that you’ll have a bunkum time!”

And this from the London Morning Post, quoting the Pennsylvania Enquirer, on 26 February 1842:

Mr. Deford (chairman of the committee on banks) accused the gentleman from the county (Mr. M’Cahen) of speaking more for “Bunkum” than a desire to promote the public good.

The next year the Morning Post on 19 July 1843 uses the word in its own copy, but in reference to the United States. The article is penned by one Sam Slick, and there are numerous articles by him that use the word in succeeding issues of the paper:

I’ll tell you what Bunkum is. All over America, every place likes to hear of its Members of Congress, and see their speeches, and if they don’t, they send a piece to the paper, enquirin’ if their Member died a nateral death, or was skewered with a bowie knife, for they hante seen his speeches lately, and his friends are anxious to know his fate. [...] In short, almost all that’s said in Congress in the colonies, for we set the fashions to them, as Paris gals do to our milliners.) and all over America is Bunkum.

But a few months later on 11 November 1843, the Bucks Herald of Aylesbury uses it to refer to libel act that is before parliament:

In fact, the act was, and ever will be, Bunkum.

And by 1845 the word had reached Australia, as evidenced by this account of boxing match that appeared in Bell’s Life in Sydney on 20 September 1845:

The stakes were not given up for one hour, it being arranged that should Arthur come to in that time, the battle should be renewed; he did come to, but, notwithstanding all the bunkum of his most sanguine backer, he could not be persuaded to again stand to the severe butting of Billy’s “nulla nulla like cobara.

Bunkum was shortened to just bunk by the end of the century. Humorist F.P. Dunne put the word into the mouth of his character Mr. Dooley, an Irish immigrant to the United States in 1893:

That is th’ real Irish village [...] I think th’ other one from Donegal is a sort of bunk, I do, an’ I niver liked Donegal.

And humorist George Ade used it in his slang-ridden 1900 “The Fable of the Grass Widow”:

One Day a keen Business manager who thought nobody could Show him was sitting at his Desk. A Grass Widow floated in, and stood Smiling at him. She was a Blonde, and had a Gown that fit her as if she had been Packed into it by Hydraulic Pressure. She was just as Demure as Edna May ever tried to be, but the Business Manager was a Lightning Calculator, and he Surmised that the Bunk was about to be Handed to him.

So that’s the tale of bunk, a.k.a. bunkum, a rare case where we’re pretty sure of the exact coinage of a word that first appears in speech.

To add a final bit of strangeness, bunk and bunkum are etymologically unrelated to bunco, meaning a swindler or a swindle. (I remember watching old episodes of the Dragnet TV series where Sgt. Friday was working out of the Los Angeles Police Department’s bunco squad.) Bunco is from the Spanish banco, a variation on three-card monte. It’s established in English by the 1870s. But while bunco and bunk are unrelated, they undoubtedly influenced and reinforced each other over the years.

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Sources:

Ade, George. “The Fable of the Grass Widow and the Mesmeree and the Six Dollars.” More Fables, Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Company, 1900, 22.

“The Clear Grit.” Chester Chronicle, 3 March 1837, 4.

“Defamation and Libel Bill.” Bucks Herald (Aylesbury, England), 11 November 1843, 3.

“Extract of a Letter from Washington.” Boston Commercial Gazette, 16 February 1829, 4. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Fight Between Black Billey, alias Young Sambo, & Mad Arthur.” Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, 20 September 1845, 3. National Library of Australia: Trove.

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

“The Missouri Bill.” History of Congress, House of Representatives, 25 February 1820, 1539. Library of Congress: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation.

“Missouri Question: Speech of Mr. Walker of N.C.” City of Washington Gazette, 11 May 1820, 2–3.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. buncombe | bunkum, n., bunk, n.4., bunco, n.

Providence Patriot, 26 May 1830, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Safire, William. Safire’s Political Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2008, s.v. bunk.

“SECOND EDITION: The United States.” Morning Post (London), 26 February 1842, 5.

Slick, Sam. “BUNKUM.—“Bunkum!” Morning Post (London), 19 July 1843, 3

Strickland, Tom. “Distressing Situation” (letter to editor). Boston Courier, 31 May 1830, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Talking to Bunkum.” Niles Weekly Register, 27 September 1828, 66. HathiTrust Digital Library.

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.

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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.