China

Eighteenth-century, Chinese, white, porcelain flask painted with an underglaze of blue waves and clouds and a red dragon

7 July 2020

The name for the country in Asia and the porcelain-ware named for it ultimately comes from Middle Chinese tsɦin, rendered in Pinyin as Qin. In Mandarin, the name refers to a state in what is now western China, c. 897–206 BCE, and a dynasty that ruled 221–206 BCE. The word’s exact route into English is uncertain, but the name makes its way into European languages with the earliest editions of the Travels of Marco Polo in the early fourteenth century. English borrowed it from Latin or another continental language.

It appears in a 1533 English translation of Damião de Góis’s The Legacye or Embassate of the Great Emperour of Inde Prester Iohn, vnto Emanuell Kynge of Portyngale. In this passage, de Góis is referring to one George Lupe Dandrade:

In the tyme of his beyng at Inde for certayne maters he had there of his prynce (where he remayned by the space of certayne yeres) one a very valyant man Lupus Soarez, by the kynges commaundement was the chyefe capitayne of the Portyngales warres, & chyefe ruler of all the realmes, cyttes, townes, and castelles, that be vnder the kynge of Portyngales domynyon, euen from Ethiope, thorough out the Chynas.

China used as a designation for porcelain appears in English by the end of the sixteenth century. It first appears as a modifier before becoming a standalone noun for the porcelain-ware. Here is a 1588 English translation of Venetian Cesare Federici’s travels to Asia:

Both the Citties are portes of the sea, and are great cities, and haue vnto them great traffique & trade of marchandize, of all sortes of spices, Drugges, Silke cloth of silk, Sandolo, Marfine, Versiue, Procelane of China: Ueluets and Scarlets that come from Portingale, and from Meca: with many other sorts of marchandize.

In his 1597 Navigator’s Supply, William Barlow recounts a conversation he had Filipino and Japanese sailors that refers to porcelain as China earth:

They described all things farre different from ours, and shewed, that in steade of our Compas, they vse a Magneticall Needle of sixe ynches long, and longer, vpon a pinne in a dish of white China earth filled with water: In the bottome whereof they haue two crosse lines, for the foure principall windes: the rest of the diuisions being reserued to the skill of their Pilots. Vpon which report of theirs, I made present triall howe a Magneticall Needle would stand in water, and found it to proue excellently well; not doubting but that many conclusions of importance in Marine affaires will thereby more readily be performed.

And in 1613, dramatist and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker refers to China dishes in his A Strange Horse-Race:

Yet would they serue this Banquet to the Table, neither in Plate, in Christall, in Chyna dishes, glasse or any other furniture, but in a Stuffe, deerer to them (and more deere to others) then any of the Mettals recited.

So, by the end of the first Elizabethan era, the word china was well established as a term for porcelain.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. china n., Qin.

Barlow, William. The Nauigators Supply. London: G. Bishop, R. Newbery, and R. Barker, 1597. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dekker, Thomas. A Strange Horse-Race. London: Nicholas Oakes for Joseph Hunt, 1613. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Federici, Cesare. The Voyage and Trauaile of M. Cæsar Frederick, Merchant of Venice, into the East India, the Indies, and Beyond the Indies. London: Richard Jones and Edward White, 1588, 6v–7r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Góis, Damião de. The Legacye or Embassate of the Great Emperour of Inde Prester Iohn, vnto Emanuell Kynge of Portyngale. London: W. Rastell, 1533, 21. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Photo credit: Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, public domain photo.

brass monkey, cold enough to freeze the balls off a

Statue of a brass monkey with detached balls in Post Office Square, Stanthorpe, Queensland, Australia, 2008

6 July 2020

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey is slang phrase that is quite literal, even though it describes an impossibility. It refers to the testicles on a brass figure of a monkey, exaggerating the severity of the temperature. But one often hears a nautical explanation for the term that bowdlerizes it and renders it “safe” for use around innocents and the easily offended.

The key to understanding the phrase is that it, like many slang phrases, existed in multiple variants in its early years, before settling into the canonical form we’re familiar with today. For instance, there is this 1835 reference from Frederic Chamier’s The Unfortunate Man to a monkey in cold weather, but with no reference to brass or to parts of the anatomy:

He was told to be silent, in a tone of voice which set me shaking like a monkey in frosty weather.

Three years later, we have this appearing in the New York Herald on 30 May 1838. It is the canonical form we know today, except it’s a reference to the monkey’s nose:

Old Knites was as cool as a cucumber, and would have been so independent of the weather, which was cold enough to freeze the nose off of a brass monkey.

And there is this sermon that was reprinted in the Plattsburgh Republican on 4 June 1842 that varies it more, including a reference to the brass monkey’s nose. I include the rather long quote mainly because this may be the only description of love in the English language that makes an allusion to sheep ticks:

When you love, you go it like water down an eave’s spout—you cling to the idols of your hearts like sheep-ticks to the wool—now the waves of joyful excitement beat about in your breasts, and now the mild moonlight of melancholy rests upon a scene of gloom and silence—now you feel a curious, silly, sublime, mysterious and magnetic sensation all over, even to your very ancles [sic], as though you were just beginning to feather out—and now again your hearts, hands, feet and flesh are as cold and senseless as the toes of a brass monkey in winter.

In these early uses, it’s not just monkeys that lose their body parts; one use of the phrase from Britain in 1859 refers to the tail of a tin opossum.

Nor is it always the cold temperature that is important in early uses of the phrase. Herman Melville’s 1847 Omoo has:

Falling to with our hoes again, we worked singly, or together, as occasion required, until “Nooning Time” came.

The period, so called by the planters, embraced about three hours in the middle of the day; during which it was so excessively hot, in this still, brooding valley, shut out from the Trades, and only open toward the leeward side of the island, that labor in the sun was out of the question. To use a hyperbolical phrase of Shorty’s, “It was ‘ot enough to melt the nose h’off a brass monkey.”

Other references to the brass monkey’s anatomy include tails, hairs, and guts. Because, as a general rule, references to genitalia in print were avoided until the latter half of the twentieth century, we don’t have a record of balls as part of the phrase in print until Eric Partridge’s 1937 Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Some of these references to other anatomical parts are undoubtedly bowdlerized versions that avoid referring to testicles in print. The key point is that balls, brass, and even monkey are not essential elements of early uses of the phrase. What is important is the phrase’s hyperbolic nature and impossibility.

We also see use of brass monkey as an adjective referring to inclement weather from at least 1890, attesting that the use of the full phrase, in all of its variants, was so common that it didn’t need to be used in full.

The oft-repeated, but false, nautical origin would have the monkey be a brass rack used to store cannonballs on board ship. According to the tale, in cold weather the rack would shrink, spilling the balls onto the deck. As we have seen, the lexical evidence doesn’t support this. The early uses of the phrase are not especially in nautical contexts, and they also refer to heat and other body parts. Furthermore, there is no record of monkey being used to mean a rack holding cannonballs (or anything similar)—although there are some seventeenth century uses of monkey to mean a type of brass cannon and monkey tail is a 19th century name for a handspike used to aim and level cannon.

And the nautical origin story ignores some basic facts of physics and naval life. First, while brass, like any metal, does contract in cold weather, the amount of such shrinkage would be so infinitesimal that it would not cause the spilling of a rack’s contents. Also, naval ships did not store cannonballs in vertical racks; the rolling of the ship made this impractical. Instead, they were stored in holes drilled in horizontal wooden planks known as shot garlands.

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Sources:

Chamier, Frederic. The Unfortunate Man, vol. 1. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835, 55. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dow, Jr. “Short Patent Sermon.” Plattsburgh Republican (New York), 4 June 1842, 1. NewsBank Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey phr., brass monkey, adj.

Melville, Herman. Omoo. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847, 258.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. brass, n. (entry partially revised post-1997), shot-garland, n.

———, third edition, September 2002, s.v. monkey, n., monkey tail, n.

“Stray Leaves from a Straggler’s Note Book.” New York Herald, 30 May 1838, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Photo credit: Vmenkov, 2008, Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

all your base are belong to us

Animated gif capture from the introduction to Zero Wing with subtitles

5 July 2020

All your base are belong to us is an ungrammatical phrase first appeared as a subtitle in the introduction of the 1991 English-language release of the Japanese video game Zero Wing. It’s a shoddy translation that became an in-joke among video gamers, who in the spirit of Kilroy and Mr. Chad copied it as a graffito wherever there was a flat surface. The relevant sequence of subtitles in the game reads as follows:

In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It’s You !!
Cats: How are you gentlemen !!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: HA HA HA HA ....
Captain: Take off every ‘zig’ !!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move ‘zig’.
Captain: For great justice.

In 1998 the phrase began to be posted to the Internet and what had been an in-joke among gamers went mainstream.

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Sources:

Mistretta, William, “Game of the Week: Zero Wing.” Gamespy.com, accessed 25 Dec 2008.

“Story of All Your Base.” Gamespy.com, accessed 25 Dec 2008.

Image credit: Toaplan, Zero Wing for the Sega Genesis Mega Drive, 1991.

charger plate

A place setting with a red charger plate

4 July 2020

If you’ve ever been to a fine-dining establishment or to a formal dinner, then you’ve probably seen a charger. A charger or charger plate is a dish on which other dishes are placed, as opposed to one upon which food is placed directly.

The term comes from Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken by the ruling class in England following the Norman Conquest. The Anglo-Norman verb charge meant to load, a sense that’s still current in English in contexts like charging one’s glass before a round of toasts or charging a battery. And the Anglo-Norman chargeur was a dish on which other dishes were placed or loaded.

Here is an early use of charger in English, from the poem “Dispute Between Mary and the Cross,” lines 165–173, recorded c. 1305, in which the cross refers to itself as the charger holding Christ’s body, making reference to the Eucharist:

I was þat cheef chargeour,
I bar flesch for folkes feste;
Ihesu crist vre saueour
He fedeþ boþe lest and meste,
Rosted a-ȝeyn þe sonne;
On me lay þe lomb of loue,
I was plater his bodi a-boue,
Til feet and hondes al-to cloue,
Wiþ blood I was be-ronne.

(I was that chief charger,
I bore flesh for the people’s feast;
Jesus Christ our savior
Roasted in the sun;
He who feeds both the least and the greatest;
On me lay the lamb of love,
I was the platter his body rested upon,
Until his feet and hands were cloven,
I was drenched with blood.)

This metaphor is rather grim, but it shows the early use of the word in the same sense it’s used today.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. chargeur, charge.

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

“Dispute Between Mary and the Cross.” In Legends of the Holy Rood. Richard Morris, ed. London: N. Trübner and Co. for the Early English Text Society, 1871, 137.

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

Photo credit: Gregory Thurston, 2009, Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

chair / chairman

3 July 2020

Chairman is a traditional title for the leader of a committee or other such body. The origin is, as one might guess, a compound of the words chair + man. The chair is a reference to a seat or position of authority and the man is, of course, a reference to the person who occupies it. But chairman, because it connotes that the occupier is male, is a sexist term, and the root chair is often used on its own refer to the person as well as the abstract seat of authority. But this latter usage is not a new change, having been in use for centuries, for as long as chairman itself.

Chair is a borrowing from Anglo-Norman French chaëre, which in turn comes from the Latin cathedra, which in turn is from the Greek καθέδρα (kathedra). The second element of the compound, man, is from the Old English mann.

Chair, simply denoting a seat for one person, is found in English sometime before 1300. One of the earliest appearances is from the poem Sir Tristrem, found in the Auchinleck Manuscript, (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1), lines 309–10:

A cheker he fond bi a cheire,
He asked who wold play.

The sense of chair meaning a literal throne or seat of authority also dates to the late thirteenth century and the romance King Horn, lines 1273–76:

Horn sat on chaere
& bad hem alle ihere.
“King,” he sede, “þu luste
A tale mid þe beste.”

(Horn sat in the chair
& bade them all to hear.
“King,” he said, “you listen to
a tale with the best.” 

“Life of St. Edmund Rich,” found in the South English Legendary, lines 265–68:

A dai as þis holi man: in diuinite
Desputede, as hit was his wone: of þe trinite,
In his chaire he sat longe: er his scolers come;
Alutel he bigan to swoudri: as a slep him nome. 

(One day as this holy man, in divinity, disputed, as was his wont, about the Trinity, in his chair he had sat long, before these scholars came; soon he began to drowse, as he had taken no sleep.)

The use of chair to refer to the presiding officer of a committee or other such body dates to the mid seventeenth century. From the Diary of Thomas Burton for 24 March 1658/9:

The Chair behaves himself like a Busby amongst so many school-boys, as some say; and takes a little too much on him, but grandly.

(Richard Busby was the chief master of the Westminster School from 1640–95. He was famous for his “magisterial severity.”)

The compound chairman is recorded a few years earlier than this use of chair. From an anonymous pamphlet, “Concerning a Treaty: To Reconcile the Differences, and Vnite the Spirits of Godly Ministers,” published sometime between 1640–49.

That in the peculiar meetings no constant and perpetuall Chairman shall be appointed, but that every one shall preside therein as it falleth out to be his turn according to the order wherein his name shall be found in the List of subscriptions unto the first declaration for a Treaty.

Although we have record of chairman existing a decade or so before this particular sense of chair, the dates are close enough, and the surviving documents from the period scanty enough, that we can consider both of them to have arisen about the same time. This use of chair to refer to a presiding official is not a politically correct neologism.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. chair, n.

Burton, Thomas. Diary, vol 4. London: Henry Colburn, 1828, 246.

“Concerning a Treaty: To Reconcile the Differences, and Vnite the Spirits of Godly Ministers.” 1640–49. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Early South-English Legendary. Carl Horstmann, ed. London: N. Trübner & Co. for the Early English Text Society (EETS), 1887, 439.

“King Horn.” In Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston. Graham Drake, Eve Salisbury, and Ronald B. Herzman, eds. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, chaier(e n.

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

Sir Tristrem (1886), George P. McNeill, ed. Scottish Text Society, 8. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1966, 9.