irregardless

14 July 2020

The word that grammar pedants most love to hate is irregardless. The origin of the term is not known for sure, but the word is most likely a blend of irrespective and regardless. (For a discussion on the use of the word, see this post.)

We do know that irregardless is originally an Americanism that appeared at the end of the eighteenth century and starts to appear regularly in newspapers in the latter half of the nineteenth. Objections to use of the word begin in 1927, some seventy-five years after the word had become established in American speech and writing and well over a century after its coinage. It didn’t start out as jocular term or a result of “uneducated” speech, but originally had a decent pedigree of appearing in respectable, edited publications before anyone thought of objecting to its use.

The oldest known use of the word is in a poem about a woman and her cat that appears in a Charleston, South Carolina newspaper on 23 June 1795:

But death, irregardless of tenderest ties,
Resolv’d the good Betty, at length, to bereave:
He strikes—the poor fav’rite reluctantly dies!
Breaks her mistress’s heart—both descend to the grave.

And here are some examples of the word’s use from the mid nineteenth century, the period when irregardless started to be regularly used:

This commentary on political ambition was originally published in the Richmond Enquirer, and was reprinted in the Daily Union on 13 July 1849:

Or is it because the bloodhound spirit of an office-seeker will track any victim so that he can but secure the spoils irregardless of any incumbent, however faithful, honest, or competent he be?

And this reminiscence in Harper’s Weekly by a servant, born in Kent, England but resident in the U.S. for twenty-two years:

I thought the young lady was the squire’s daughter where Master Ralph was visiting; but when he came to stay at Chatham, and I was more with him, I found she was the daughter of a tradesman, and her name was Brown; and then I knew that Master Ralph had no business with her, and I felt it my stern duty, irregardless of all results, to break off this acquaintance.

And this from an 1865 Civil War history of a Massachusetts regiment:

It is the privilege of a Surgeon to remain in the rear in time of battle, and some Surgeons regard it, I believe, as a regulation; but our Surgeon, irregardless alike of either privilege or regulation, in his desire to aid in beating the enemy, allowed his enthusiasm to get mastery over his prudence.

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Sources:

“The ‘Blood-hound’ Spirit.” Daily Union (Washington, DC), 13 July 1849, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Cushman, Frederick E. History of the 58th Regt. Massachusetts Vols. Washington, DC: Gibson Brothers, 1865, 18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Merriam-Webster.com, s.v. irregardless. Accessed 13 July 2020.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1994, s.v. irregardless.

“The Old Woman and her Tabby.” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Charleston, SC), 23 June 1795, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. irregardless, adj. and adv.

Willis, James. “A Story of Our Family.” Harper’s Weekly, vol. 3, no. 110, 5 February 1859, 92. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

cloud nine

13 July 2020

A Dixie Dugan comic strip from 6 June 1946 using the phrase on cloud 9

To be on cloud nine is to be in euphoric state. Many people speculate on the origin of the phrase, wondering what the significance of the number nine might be, but the origin and underlying metaphor is rather straightforward, and the use of the number nine is arbitrary. The nine really doesn’t stand for anything (cf. the whole nine yards). The phrase as we know it is relatively recent, appearing in 1930s American slang, but it has predecessors going back the seventeenth century.

In the seventeenth century, the phrase in the clouds could be used to refer to things that were either unknown or mystical, that is things known only to God in the heavens. For example, Nathaniel Bacon, writing in 1651 about the reign of Henry IV (1399–1413):

However, for the present the House of Lancaster hath the Crown intailed, and the Inheritance is left in the Clouds to be revealed in due time.

And by the nineteenth century, to have one’s head in the clouds is to be unconcerned with practical, down-to-earth matters, a phrase that is still very much in use. From Maria Edgeworth’s 1806 novel Leonora:

What the devil would you have of your wife, my dear L——? You would be loved above all earthly considerations; honour, duty, virtue, and religion inclusive, would you? and you would have a wife with her head in the clouds, would you? I wish you were married to one of the all-for-love heroines, who would treat you with bowl and dagger every day of your life.

The addition of a number to the cloud occurs in American slang in the 1930s and was likely influenced by or a play on seventh heaven. Albin Pollock’s 1935 glossary of criminal slang, The Underworld Speaks, records:

Cloud eight, befuddled on account of drinking too much liquor.

And two years later, on 15 August 1937, sportswriter Harry Borba subtracts one and connects the resulting on cloud seven with the older sense of being left to fate or the gods:

But the subject of harangue—and we’re sure they argue up there on cloud seven—is not about the futility of war to end all wars. It is about that unending warfare between universities and college football.

On 12 November 1944, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper uses on cloud eight to refer to the divinity that is Greta Garbo when relaying a tale about the actress during the filming of the 1927 silent movie Love, an adaptation of Anna Karenina:

Within a few minutes Goulding was at work on her hair, with his mouth full of hairpins. That did it. By that simple device Garbo, momentarily stunned, got off her perch somewhere on cloud eight and became one of the people.

Finally, on 6 June 1946 the comic strip Dixie Dugan uses on cloud nine to describe a lovestruck woman:

Wow—Is she on cloud 9—Maybe he is worth waiting for.

The following year, a storyline in the Dixie Dugan comic featured an airplane named Cloud 9.

And in 1951, jazz singer Julia Lee, famous for her edgy and risqué lyrics, recorded the song “Pipe Dreams (Up on Cloud Nine)” about an opium high. The phrase doesn’t appear in the song itself, only in the title. (At least, it isn’t in the recorded version I have heard.)

And on 25 March 1952 a syndicated description of the NCAA basketball tournament appearing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other papers, uses on cloud nine to describe a team’s hopes for victory:

Clyde Lovellette, the cloud scraping Kansan with 27 nicknames, is the terror of the NCAA basketball tournament before he has even lifted a finger.

“After we won the western regional in Corvallie, Ore.,” said Coach Bobby Feerick of Santa Clara today, “we were on cloud nine. We came down fast when we saw Lovellette there.”

At about this time, nine becomes cemented as the canonical number in the phrase and uses of cloud seven and cloud eight fade away. So, it seems that the number nine has no actual significance. Perhaps the fact that nine has mystical connotations in some numerological systems helped it beat out the competition from seven or eight, but any such connection doesn’t seem to factor into the phrase’s meaning.

Some have contended that in the 1930s the U.S. Weather Bureau promulgated a nine-tiered system of cloud classification, but I have been unable to find any such classification scheme. In 1910 the International Meteorological Committee met in Paris and put forward definitions for ten different cloud types, and these were republished by the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1928, but the ten definitions can be combined into a larger number of cloud types. And the phrases cloud one, cloud two, cloud three, etc. are not used. Currently, the U.S. National Weather Service classifies clouds into thirty-two types. While it is within the realm of possibilities that the meteorological schema influenced the phrase, there is no reason to think that it did.

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Sources:

Bacon, Nathaniel. The Continuation of An Historicall Discourse of the Government of England. London: Thomas Roycroft for Matthew Walbanck and Henry Twyford, 1651, 128. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Borba, Harry. “Borba-Rometer.” San Francisco Examiner, 15 August 1937, SF5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Capital Buyer’s Guide” (advertisement). Billboard, 27 January 1951, 19.

Edgeworth, Maria. Leonora, vol. 2. London: Joseph Johnson, 1806, 24.

“Giant Kansas Cager Feared by NCAA Foes.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 25 March 1952, 14. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. cloud nine n.

Hopper, Hedda. “Thar’s Gold in That Thar Goulding.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 November 1944, D2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

McEvoy, J.P. and John H. Striebel. Dixie Dugan (comic strip). Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 6 June 1946, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. Dixie Dugan (comic strip). Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 23 April 1947, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“NOAA/NWS and NASA’s Sky Watcher Chart.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Air and Space Administration. Accessed 13 May 2020. https://gewa.gsfc.nasa.gov/clubs/sailing/IMAGES/MISCELLANEOUS/CloudChart.pdf.

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

———, third edition, June 2013, s.v., head, n.1.

Pollock, Albin J. The Underworld Speaks. San Francisco: Prevent Crime Bureau, 1935.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau. Cloud Forms According to the International System of Classification. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

church key

A church key manufactured by a Pennsylvania brewery, c. 1940

10 July 2020

Church key is American slang for a bottle or can opener. Prior to the advent of twist-off bottle caps and pull-tabs on drink cans, a device was needed to open those containers. A typical church key has a round bottle opener at one end and a triangular punch for opening holes in cans, and as such resembles an old-style key, such as those found in churches. Hence the name. Of course, the irony of a church key opening a beer can played into the coining and spread of the term.

While the devices are older, the term dates to at least 1951 when it appears in an article on barroom slang in the American West. The mention is brief, just a definition:

Church key: A bottle opener.

Of course, the fact that the first record of it is in a glossary means that the term was circulating in speech for some time before this.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v., church n.3. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/dvmfbpi#e5f3nda

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. church key, n.

Wallrich, William J. “Barroom Slang from the Upper Rio Grande.” Western Folklore, 10.2, April 1951, 170, DOI: 10.2307/1497973.

Photo credit: unknown photographer, a. 1977, public domain image.

chow

9 July 2020

Chow is slang for food, especially that served in an institutional setting, such as the military. Chow is palatable and nourishing, but no one would mistake it for that served in a Michelin star restaurant. The word comes from one of the languages of Asia but pinning it down more precisely has been maddeningly frustrating. It is undoubtedly related to the Cantonese zaap6, meaning mixed, but whether this is the origin of the root or simply one it its instantiations is not known.

Part of the problem is that the eighteenth-century sources in which the element chow first appear are imprecise in specifying what language or dialect they are discussing (e.g. several early accounts refer to natives of Palau in the western Pacific as “Chinese”). Henry Harris’s self-published 1790 Dictionary of Hindostany, a distinctly amateurish lexicographic effort by today’s standards, records multiple words that use the root chow, which seems to mean all or every, but is unclear whether these are Hindi or another of the languages spoken in India. He clearly references multiple languages in his book, but never specifies which he is referring to in any given instance.

But what we do know is that the word came into English in the reduplicative form chow-chow, transmitted to English sailors from natives of Palau. In September 1783 the British East India Company packet ship Antelope, captained by Henry Wilson, was wrecked off the island of Ulong in Palau. Two accounts of the wreck and the crew’s contact with the islanders were published in 1788. One by George Keate reads:

They had caught only four, two of which were given to the English, and by the ship’s steward divided into messes. The Chinese dressed their portion differently, making a mixture with rice, and other things, which they call Chow Chow.

The second, by an anonymous officer of the Antelope, describes the same incident thusly:

The meat resembled that of the cod, solid and firm: it is in great estimation among the natives; and it may truly be esteemed a delicacy. The China-men cooked their allotment with rice, and other ingredients, giving the name of “Chow-Chow.”

But chow-chow was not restricted to Palau. Aeneas Anderson’s 1795 account of British diplomats in China from 1792–94 includes a glossary, which has this entry:

Chow-Chow – – – Victuals or meat.

And a century later, Yule and Burnell’s 1886 glossary of Anglo-Indian words, Hobson-Jobson includes this rather lengthy entry, which includes the shorter form chow:

CHOW-CHOW, s. A common application of the Pigeon-English term in China is to mixed preserves; but, as the quotation shows, it has many uses; the idea of mixture seems to prevail. It is the name given to a book by Viscountess Falkland, whose husband was Governor of Bombay. There it seems to mean “a medley of trifles.” Chow is in “pigeon” applied to food of any kind. [“From the erroneous impression that dogs form one of the principal items of a Chinaman’s diet, the common variety has been dubbed the ‘chow dog’” (Ball, Things Chinese, p. 179).] We find the word chow-chow in Blumentritt’s Vocabular of Manilla terms: “Chau-chau, a Tagal dish so called.”

1858. “The word chow-chow is suggestive, especially to the Indian reader, of a mixture of things, ‘good, bad, and indifferent,’ of sweet little oranges and bits of bamboo stick, slices of sugar-cane and rinds of unripe fruit, all concocted together and made upon the whole into a very tolerable confection...

“Lady Falkland, by her happy selection of a name, to a certain extent deprecates and disarms criticism. We cannot complain that her work is without plan, unconnected, and sometimes trashy, for these are exactly the conditions implied in the word chow-chow.”—Bombay Quarterly Review, January, p. 100.

1882. “The variety of uses to which the compound word ‘chow-chow’ is put is almost endless....A ‘No. 1 chow-chow’ thing signifies utterly worthless, but when applied to a breakfast or dinner it means ‘unexceptionally good.’ A ‘chow-chow’ cargo is an assorted cargo; a ‘general shop’ is a ‘chow-chow’ shop....one (factory) was called the ‘chow-chow,’ from its being inhabited by divers Parsees, Moormen, or other natives of India.”—The Fankwae, p. 63.

So, in the nineteenth century chow-chow in English came to mean any sort of mixture or medley, especially, but not limited to, food.

The 1886 Hobson-Jobson records the shortened form chow, but that’s not the first appearance of the word in English. It appears in the 27 November 1856 Sacramento, California newspaper Spirit of the Age:

Ah Chow—ah in the Celestial lingo means Mr, Chow something good to eat.

And by the 1890s, chow is appearing quite frequently on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. chow2, n.

Anderson, Aeneas. A Narrative of the British Embassy to China in the Years 1792, 1793, and 1794. Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1795, 392.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. chow, n.1.

Harris, Henry. A Dictionary of English and Hindostany, vol. 2 (vol. 1 never published). Madras: 1790.

Keate, George. An Account of the Pelew Islands. Dublin: Luke White, 1788, 123. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Moody, Andrew J. “Transmission Languages and Source Languages of Chinese Borrowings in English.” American Speech, 71.4, Winter 1996, 416.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. chow, n., chow-chow, n. and adj.

The Shipwreck of the Antelope East-India Packet. London: D. Brewman for R. Randall, 1788, 71. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Yule, Henry and Arthur Coke Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: Being a Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms. New Edition Edited by William Crooke. London: John Murray, 1886, 164. HathiTrust Digital Library.

stan

Eminem performing live in Washington, D.C., 2014

8 July 2020

Stan is slang for an obsessive fan, and it’s inspired by the song “Stan” by rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers). The lyrics tell the story of an obsessed fan of the rapper, named Stan, who ends up killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend:

You got some issues Stan, I think you need some counseling
To help your ass from bouncing off the walls when you get down some

The song appears on the album The Marshall Mathers LP, which was released on 23 May 2000.

Use of stan as a label for a fan appears as early as 29 October 2000 in the magazine New Musical Express in a review of the song:

This twisted journey into the mind of an embittered Mark Chapman type takes on a whole new dimension in front of thousands of potential Stans.

And in December 2001 the rapper Nas uses stan on his diss track “Ether” to refer to a wannabe rapper who imitates established artists. In particular the song is directed at and supposedly describes JayZ, whose recently released “Takeover” was a diss on Nas and another rapper, Prodigy. Nas writes:

Well life is hard, hug me, don't reject me
Or make records to disrespect me, blatant or indirectly
In '88 you was getting chased through your building
Callin' my crib and I ain't even give you my numbers
All I did was give you a style for you to run with
Smilin' in my face, glad to break bread with the God
Wearin' Jaz' chains, no TEC's, no cash, no cars
No jail bars, Jigga, no pies, no case
Just Hawaiian shirts, hangin' with little Chase
You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pussy, a Stan
I still whip yo' ass, you 36 in a karate class?

Urban Dictionary records the term on 31 January 2006, and an entry dated 5 February 2006 reads:

Stan

Based on the central character in the Eminem song of the same name, a "stan" is an overzealous maniacal fan for any celebrity or athlete.

A Typical Kobe Bryant Stan would say something like.

"Kobe Bryant scored 81 points last night. Kobe could beat God himself in a game of 1 on 1 hoops. To hell with Michael Jordan or Wilt Chamberlain, they arent on Kobe's level!"

(Urban Dictionary is hardly an authoritative secondary source, but since it dates its entries it can, with appropriate care, be used as evidence for a slang term’s existence and meaning.)

Since the early 2000s, stan has been widely used on the internet and social media, but like most slang terms, is more rarely found in published sources.

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Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2018, s.v. stan, n.2.

Urbandictionary.com, s.v. stan

Photo Credit: E.J. Hersom for U.S. Department of Defense News, 2014.