cabal

26 June 2020

A cabal is a group of conspirators or a secret plot or conspiracy; it is also verb meaning to plot or conspire. The word is ultimately from the Hebrew Kabbalah, the set of Jewish, post-biblical, mystical teachings. It comes into English from French in the late sixteenth century, which in turn got it from medieval Latin, which borrowed it from Hebrew. In English use over the centuries, the meaning of the word has shifted from the original sense to generalize into any secret or arcane knowledge, then dropping the knowledge component and keeping the secret, shifting into the realm of conspiracy.

The word appears in English by about 1575 in the sense of Kabbalah. From The Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthony of Gueuara:

The law of Moyses I do not deny, but your Cabal I can in no wise credit, but vtterly defie, & firmly beleue the Gospell of Iesus Christ.

By 1606 it is being used in a more general sense to mean secret or arcane knowledge. In his Foure Bookes of Offices, Barnabe Barnes writes of the mysteries of good governance which commoners are incapable of understanding:

Those secrets of a State, which commonly fore beyond the vulgar apprehension, beeing certaine rules, or as it were cabals of glorious gouernment and successe both in peace and warre (apprehensible to few secret Counsellors in some Commonweales, which either languish or wax vnfortunate) are locked vp in foure generall rules.

And in 1635, David Person uses the word to refer to the secrets of the natural world:

And it is this sort of Knowledge, which properly we call Philosophy, or Physick, which in this Treatise I intend most to handle; and by which, as by one of the principall parts of Philosophy, the reader may have an insight in the Cabals and secrets of Nature.

Unsurprisingly, it is in the run up to the English Civil War that cabal is used to refer to secret plots against the government and the crown. In 1642, the pseudonymous Theophilus Philanax Gerusiphilus Philalethes Decius writes:

Oh but his Majesty hath heard of the License taken by them at their private Cabals to undervalue and vilifie the Kings person, and power: Of their having designed to have taken the Prince his son from him by force; nay to have seised on his own sacred Person: Of a solemn Combination, and Conspiracie entred into by them, for altering the Government of the Church and State

And in 1645, David Buchanon uses it as a verb:

So these number and power of the Slaves of Iniquity growing, they are plotting, caballing, and devising how to supplant another, and increase their sever all faction.

There is an old, incorrect etymology of cabal that you will occasionally see pop up. It says that the word is an acronym for the names of five ministers to King Charles II of England. Gilbert Burnet, writing about events of 1672, records this notion in his 1724 Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time:

And this Junto, together with the Duke of Buckingham, being called the Cabal, it was observed that Cabal proved a technical word, every letter in it being the first letter of those five, Clifford, Ashly, Buckingham, Arlington, and Lauderdale.

Burnet probably did not believe that cabal had an acronymic origin, rather he was saying that in this instance it could coincidentally form one. Nevertheless, people have mistakenly believed that the word was originally an acronym.

While acronyms have been formed from existing words, such as cabal, dating back to antiquity, there are no examples of new words being formed from acronyms until the nineteenth century, and that method of word formation is extremely rare until the twentieth.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. cabal.

Barnes, Barnabe. Foure Bookes of Offices. London: George Bishop, 1606, 28. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Buchanon, David. A Short and True Relation of Some Main Passages of Things. London: R. Raworth for R. Bostock, 1645. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Burnet, Gilbert. Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, vol 1 of 2. London: Thomas Ward, 1724, 307–08. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Decius, Theophilus Philanax Gerusiphilus Philalethes. An Answer to the Lord George Digbies Apology for Himself. London, 1642, 63. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Guevara, Antonio de. The Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthony of Gueuara. London: Henry Bynneman, c.1575, 403. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Person, David. Varieties. London: Richard Badger for Thomas Alchorn, 1635, 3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

by and large

25 June 2020

Anyone who studies word origins even cursorily, notes that amateur word sleuths have a tendency to give nautical origins to words and phrases, and seemingly more often than not such origins are wrong. I don’t know why this is, but it is so common that one of the denizens of this site, Dr. Techie, coined an acronym to denote it: CANOE, the Conspiracy to Attribute Nautical Origins to Everything.

But despite this tendency, there are a fair number of words and phrases in English that do have their origins in sailing. After all, as the song goes, “Britannia rules the waves.” One of these phrases is by and large, which in general usage means in every respect.

But on the seas, to sail by the wind is to sail as directly into the wind as possible, and to sail large is to run with the wind at one’s back. So, a ship that sails well both by and large performs well in all sorts of winds. These terms date to the late sixteenth century. William Bourne’s 1578 Treasure for Traueilers explains it thusly:

And fyrst thus, as concerning the making of the moulde of any ships, this is to be noted, that those ships that are of easye draft, that is to say, not to goe to deepe in the Sea or water, and wyll beare a good sayle, and doth stere well, that is to say, that it wyll feele the Ruther as soone as the Helme or Tyller is put to or fro, and those ships doe goe or sayle well beeringe or afore the winde, that is to say, the winde to be large or to come right after them, all those ships doe sayle well and close by the winde, that is to say, the Bowline to be haled harde or close, and the ship to stande or come as neare the winde as may be: those Shippes must draw a reasonable draft of water: and also to be a reasonable good length, and these ships wyll goe well a head the sea

Shortly after writing this, Bourne used the phrase by and large in this literal, nautical sense in his Inuentions or Deuises (both books are dated 1578, but the latter references the former, so we know which came first):

For to make a Ship to drawe or goe but little into the water, and to hold a good winde, and to saile well both by and large, were very necessarie, and especially in these our shallowe Seas.

The earliest citation for by and large in the Oxford English Dictionary comes almost a century after Bourne’s works, in Samuel Sturmy’s 1669 The Mariner’s Magazine. Sturmy sums up a discussion on how to handle a ship in various wind conditions with this:

Thus you see the Ship handled in fair weather and foul, by and learge.

A few decades later, we see the phrase being used metaphorically in the now familiar sense of in all aspects or as a whole. But the overall context is still nautical. In his 1707 The Wooden World Dissected, Edward Ward describes the various types of men found on board ship. He uses an extended sailing metaphor to describe the leadership capabilities of a ship’s lieutenant in comparison to the captain:

But tho’ he trys every way, both by and large, to keep up with his leader, he’s commonly wrong’d very much for want of [S]ail and Skill too, so that how well soever he can weather upon others, he never is able to forereach upon his Commander.

And in his description of the common sailor he uses the phrase plainly, without a deliberate and extended metaphor:

In fine, take this same plain blunt Sea Animal, by and large, in his Tar-Jacket, and wide-kneed Trowzers, and you’ll find him of more intrinsick Value to the Nation, than the most fluttering Beau in it.

By the mid nineteenth century, by and large is being used by those having nothing to do with the sea. From Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret:

“The Parson,” said the cow-herd, whom Margaret reached and quieted, “is the worst pair of horns I ever druv [sic], and I have had the business now rising of sixty year, and take it by and large, fifty head a season, and she is the beater of all.”

So, by and large has a rather straightforward, if non-obvious, nautical origin.

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Sources:

Bourne, William. A Booke Called the Treasure for Traueilers. London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1578, 20. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Inuentions or Deuises. London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1578, 12. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Judd, Sylvester. Margaret. Boston: Jordan and Wiley, 1845, 283. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, by and large, adv.

Sturmy, Samuel. The Mariner’s Magazine. London: E. Cotes, 1669, 17. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Ward, Edward. The Wooden World Dissected. London: H. Meere, 1707, 35, 107–08.

buy the farm

24 June 2020

To buy the farm is military, especially U.S. Air Force, slang meaning to die, especially in an aircraft crash. That particular wording dates at least to the Korean War—it’s very likely older, perhaps dating to World War II, but older written uses haven’t been unearthed—but there are older formulations using the verb to buy that mean the same thing.

The earliest example of buy the farm that I’ve found is from the Memphis, Tennessee Commercial Appeal for 3 November 1952, in an article about jet combat in Korea:

Two of the MIGs had me wired for sound. Cannonballs were flying thick and fast. I thought I’d had it—bought the farm.”

The phrase is also glossed in a New York Times article on U.S. Air Force slang on 7 March 1954:

BOUGHT A PLOT: Had a fatal crash.

Another early example is from two years later, in the Los Angeles Times for 5 December 1955 in another article about air force fliers:

“Sure luck nobody bought the farm!”
Translated this means:
[...]
“Sure lucky nobody was killed.”

And it makes its way into the linguistics journal American Speech in May 1955:

BUY THE FARM; BUY A PLOT, v. phr. Crash fatally. (Jet pilots say that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer usually sues the government for damages done to his farm by the crash, and the amount demanded is always more than enough to pay off the mortgage or even buy the farm outright. Since this type of crash is nearly always fatal to the pilot, “the pilot pays for the farm with this life.”)

While the definition given here is correct, the explanation is probably wrong, for reasons that will be made clear below. But we can’t dismiss the liability metaphor out of hand. We have examples of similar metaphors at play. One example of buy being used for liability for damages is this 1938 American Speech article on the slang of bus drivers:

BOUGHT A CAR (or TELEPHONE POLE, etc.) A driver is to blame for an accident.

More likely, however, the metaphor at play in the Air Force phrase is not a liability lawsuit, but rather the death benefit that U.S. military service people get if they die in line of duty. The idea is that the payment would be sufficient to buy the parents’ farm. Also, the inclusion of buy a plot in the American Speech entry militates against the liability explanation; plot is commonly used to mean a gravesite.

We have an example of the death benefit usage from World War II. The phrase buy the farm here is not a metaphor, but rather is quite literal. An Associated Press story of 26 April 1944 tells the story of Navy sailor Johnnie Hutchins who posthumously received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the invasion of Lae, New Guinea the previous September:

When young Johnnie was home the last time he had told the folks that if anything happened to him he wanted them to use the death benefit money to buy the farm. And so when the check from the Navy came last winter it went to make the down payment on the farm at Lissie.

This example would indicate that early uses of the phrase were likely to have been in all the services, not just the Air Force. The fact that we have no uses of the metaphor until almost ten years later, and all of those are in an Air Force, doesn’t strain credulity. Slang terms frequently go for decades before seeing print. It seems likely that buy the farm became a slang term during World War II and went unnoticed by those outside military circles until another war a decade later.

And both the liability and death benefit metaphors may be at play. A phrase can certainly represent multiple underlying ideas.

Furthermore, the form buy the farm is not the oldest use of buy in this sense. It has predecessors dating back over a hundred years.

The idea of buying death, or more generally a mishap, goes back to at least 1826—if not considerably earlier, as in the ancient myth of paying the ferryman to cross over to the other side. But it appears in that year in William Glascock’s Naval Sketchbook:

So you may suppose every man was at his gun in a crack; and never mind, in closing with Crappo [i.e., the French], if we didn’t buy it with his raking broadsides.

And buying it appears in the context of air combat in World War I. From Walter Noble’s 1920 With a Bristol Fighter Squadron:

A lucky shot might at any moment send us crashing to earth. How we got away without a scratch is a marvel. The engine was not damaged; but the wings and fuselage, with fifty-three bullet holes, caused us to realize on our return how near had been to “buying it.”

And buy it appears in the context of air combat during World War II. Hunt and Pringle’s 1943 Service Slang: A First Selection records:

He bought it, he was shot down.

And from the inter-war years, but presumably dating to World War I in oral usage, Fraser and Gibbons’s 1925 Soldier and Sailor Words have a more general, less deadly, use of buy in military slang:

To buy, to have something not desired, such as a job, thrust on one unexpectedly, e.g., “Just as he was going out, he ran into the Corporal and bought a fatigue.” [...] Another meaning: to be scored off or victimized. Of a man getting an answer to a question which made him ridiculous: “He bought it that time.”

That same source has buying a packet meaning to be wounded:

Packet, a bullet wound, e.g. it would be said of a wounded man:—He “stopped a packet” or “bought a packet”—i.e., got hit by a bullet. Also, any trouble or unexpected bad luck.

So, buying a farm is a variation on the much older buying it, based on either a metaphor of buying a burial plot or the parent’s farm with one’s military death benefit, perhaps influenced by the notion of the military’s liability for damages on the ground caused by crashed aircraft.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “Parents Get Farm, Medal.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 April 1944, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Engler, Leo F. “A Glossary of United States Air Force Slang.” American Speech, 30.2, May 1955, 116.

Glascock, William N. Naval Sketchbook, second edition, vol. 1. London: Henry Colburn, 1826, 30. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Gray, Robert. “47 States Have Sent MiG-Killers to War.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 3 November 1952, 22. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. buy the farm v.

“Jet-Stream of Talk.” New York Times, 7 March 1954, SM20. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Miles, Marvin. “U.S. Fliers Wage Real Cold War.” Los Angeles Times, 5 December 1955, 21. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Morris, Bernard. “The Lingo of Bus Drivers.” American Speech, 13.4, December 1938, 308.

Nobel, Walter. With a Bristol Fighter Squadron. London: A. Melrose, 1920, 70. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 with draft additions from June 2003, s.v. buy, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. packet, n. and adj.

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.