cloak and dagger

4 August 2020

The adjectival phrase cloak and dagger denotes intrigue and espionage. The phrase itself arises in the nineteenth century, but the metaphor of a dagger concealed underneath a cloak for treachery is much older. Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” the first of the Canterbury Tales, dating to c.1387 uses the metaphor in describing what is within the temple of Mars, the god of war:

Of Felonye, and al the compassyng;
The crueel Ire, reed as any gleede;
The pykepurs, and eek the pale Drede;
The smylere with the knyf under the cloke;
The shepne brennynge with the blake smoke;
The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;
The open werre, with woundes al bibledde;
Contek, with blody knyf and sharp manace.

(Of treachery, and all the scheming;
The cruel Ire, red as any glowing coal;
The pick-purse, and also the pale dread;
The smiler with the knife under the cloak;
The sheepfold burning with the black smoke;
The treason of the murdering in the bed;
The open war, all covered with blood from wounds:
Strife, with bloody knife and sharp menacing.)

The coining of the modern phrase was influenced by an early-modern Spanish genre of drama, comedia de capa y espada, or comedy of the cloak and sword. That phrase appears in English by 1806 in a biography of Spanish playwright Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635):

Yet even in Lope’s works there is an evident difference in his conception as well as execution of two distinct species of dramatic compositions. In one, the characters and incidents are intended to excite surprise and admiration; in the other, merriment mixed occasionally with interest. Love indeed is the subject of both: but in one it is the love which distinguished the ages of chivalry; in the other, the gallantry which succeeded to it, and which the poets had only to copy from the times in which they lived. The plays of the latter description, when the distinction became more marked, acquired the name of Comedias de Capa y Espada, Comedies of the Cloak and Sword, from the dresses in which they were represented; and the former that of Heroic Comedies, from the character of the personages and incidents which compose them.

Cloak and sword dramas were melodramatic adventures featuring romance and intrigue. But the use of the phrase cloak and sword in English remained restricted to this genre of plays.

By the 1840s, cloak and dagger started being used for intrigue. There are numerous older uses of the collocation of cloak with dagger to literally mean those items, but the earliest metaphorical use I’ve found is in Charles Dickens’s 1841 Barnaby Rudge:

His servant brought in a very small scrap of dirty paper, tightly sealed in two places, on the inside of whereof was inscribed in pretty large text, these words :—“A friend. Desiring of a conference. Immediate. Private. Burn it when you’ve read it.”

“Where in the name of the Gunpowder Plot did you pick up this?” said his master.

It was given him by a person then waiting at the door, the man replied.

“With a cloak and dagger?” said Mr. Chester.

With nothing more threatening about him, it appeared, than a leather apron and a dirty face. “Let him come in.”

From there cloak and dagger would become a synonym for intrigue and suspense.

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Sources:

Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1.1996–2003. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dickens, Charles (“Boz”). Barnaby Rudge. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1841, 106. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Holland, Henry Richard Vassal. Some Account of the Life and Writings of Lope Felix de Vega Carpio. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806, 125–26. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

cut to the chase

Chase scene from Seven Chances, starring Buster Keaton, 1925

3 August 2020

The phrase cut to the chase is a request to get to the point, to be concise in one’s words. The phrase comes out of the motion picture industry, particularly the silent film era, where one of the tenets of style was to highlight the action sequences of a movie.

The phrase appears by 1929, when it was used quite literally in reference to film-making in J.P. McAvoy’s book, which may have the best title ever: Simon and Schuster Present the Supercolossal Wonder Picture Epoch of This or Any Other Century, Hollywood Girl:

That’s all with a lot of sound and effects and love is just a big gag socko she’s in love hit her in the heart with a custard pie klunk that’s a laugh isn’t that a wow now we cut to the chase she’s after him he’s after her he hides.

Another early, literal use appears in the Minneapolis Tribune of 9 September 1934 in a description of a studio mogul’s office:

In Mr. Hecht’s office there are several large signs for the guidance and inspiration of his staff. One reads: “Better’n Metro is not quite good enough.” Another says tersely: “Cut to the chase!”

This last is Mr. Hecht’s way of saying “eliminate everything up to the climax.” Mr. Hecht’s idea of the perfect movie is “Opening scene: man heaves a custard pie. The next five reels: He is chased.”

In the 1940s we see the phrase shift over into the metaphorical. Here is a nice example of a metaphorical use from 13 November 1946, but the source is the entertainment industry newspaper Variety, indicating that it is still mainly an industry jargon term. The author, Frank Scully, is writing about a conversation he had with a member of King George II of Greece’s cabinet about their escape from Nazi forces in 1941:

At the time, we were housing in America a parade of royal refugees. [...] Waiting for the third act curtain to go up on a show which had flopped badly in its first and second, I was prepared to pull a Nathan and leave before the final fold when one of the cabinet cut to the chase. He began telling how George got out of Greece.

Scully was quite fond of the phrase and used it frequently in his Variety column over the following years.

It took a while for the phrase to completely separate itself from the film industry. Here is an example from the Los Angeles Times of 23 July 1980 that has no obvious connection to the movies:

We hadn’t talked in a while so we did the how-are-you, how’s-your-wife, are-you-having-a-nice-summer thing. I finally cut to the chase.

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Sources:

Estcourt, Charles. “New York Skylines.” Minneapolis Tribune, 9 September 1934, 16. ProQuest.

McAvoy, J.P. Simon and Schuster Present the Supercolossal Wonder Picture Epoch of This or Any Other Century, Hollywood Girl. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929, 106. (Copy unavailable; quotation taken from Wordhistories.net.)

Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions January 2002, s.v. cut. v.

Scully, Frank. “Scully’s Scrapbook.” Variety, 13 November 1946, 53. ProQuest.

Thompson, Zan. “Baritone, Safety Songs and Search for a Lead.” Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1980, D1. ProQuest.

Photo credit: Internet Movie Database, imdb.com.

cut the mustard

1 August 2020

Cut the mustard is an Americanism that means to meet expectations or requirements. It appears at in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. Here is an early example from Texas in the Galveston Daily News of 9 April 1891:

The Nebraska legislators ran high jinks out of the city on the night of their adjournment. They applied several coats of a carmine hue and cut the mustard all over their predecessors.

And another from Nebraska a few weeks later, in the Omaha World-Herald of 10 May 1891:

Nebraska City has two local teams this year. In the language of Shakespeare she “couldn’t cut the mustard” on a paid nine.

Mustard is, of course, the name for a number of plants in the genera Brassica and Sinapis, that are used to make the tabletop condiment. The word comes from the Anglo-Norman mustarde and makes its English appearance in the late thirteenth century. Beyond its literal meaning, mustard has long been used as a metaphor for pungency or zest. The phrase keen as mustard, meaning eager or zealous, dates to the seventeenth century.

The use of the verb to cut in the Americanism is a bit confusing to us today. But in the nineteenth century, and in some contexts still to this day, to cut can mean to outdo, to surpass. For example, there is this from the 13 April 1884 issue of The Referee:

George's performance [...] is hardly likely to be disturbed for a long time to come, unless he cuts it himself.

So, to cut the mustard is to metaphorically be zestier than the condiment.

It is frequently suggested that the phrase is a variation on pass muster, originally a military expression meaning to pass an inspection, but there are no examples of cut muster meaning to surpass or outdo. So, this explanation doesn’t cut the mustard.

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Sources:

Galveston Daily News (Texas), 9 April 1891, 4. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Nebraska Ball Notes.” Omaha World-Herald, 10 May 1891, 10. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989. s.v. cut, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2003, s.v. mustard, n. and adj.

cunt

31 July 2020

Cunt is, of course, a word for the female genitalia and is used as an epithet. Its use as an epithet for a woman is extremely offensive, rivaling the N-word in that respect. Other uses, such as its literal use or the British use as an epithet for a man, are not quite so offensive, but no sense of the word could be considered polite by any stretch of the imagination. And as in the case of many such offensive words, their taboo nature makes discovery of the origin difficult. The word is simply not recorded all that often until the twentieth century.

There was probably an Old English noun *cunte meaning cleft or split, and perhaps also used to refer to the female genitalia, but if that word existed, it does not appear in the extant manuscripts. The phrase cuntan heale does appear in three surviving charters as features marking out property boundaries. The exact meaning of the phrase is uncertain but is likely something along the lines of cleft valley/hollow. (The phrase can be found by searching the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, but the word does not appear in the dictionary proper because the editors classified the phrase as a toponym, which the dictionary does not include by policy.) For example, there is this from an eleventh century forgery of a 900 C.E. grant of land from King Edward of Wessex-Mercia to the Abbey of New Minster in Winchester (Birch 596):

Of þam hwitan treowe on ðæt norð healde treow. Of ðam norð healdan treowe to cuntan heale. Of cuntan heale on ðone lytlan wyll.

(From the white tree to the tree bent to the north. From the tree bent to the north to the cleft hollow. From the cleft hollow to the little spring.)

And this from 960 C.E. grant of land to Brithelm, Bishop of Winchester by King Edgar (Birch 1054)

of ðære gearn windan fæt to stybban snade ðer wær ða twegen wegas tolicgað. þonon to cuntan heale. of þan heale to wifeles stigele.

(From there wind a basket of yarn to the cut stump where the roads run in two directions. then on to the cleft hollow. from the hollow to the weevil’s stile.)

Many of the other early appearances are also topographical. There is, for example, a 1221 reference to a Cuntelowe (cleft hill) in Warwickshire and a 1246 reference to Kuntecliue (cleft valley) in Lancashire. The word has cognates in many Germanic languages. It is often suggested that it shares the Proto-Indo-European root (s)keu- root with the Latin cunnus, meaning the female pudenda, and this may be the case, but if so, the addition of the / t / in the Germanic forms cannot be explained.

Some of the thirteenth century toponyms may be Danish in origin, rather than reflecting a native English form. There are also several street names which would appear to reference genitalia: Gropecuntelane (1223) in London and c.1230 in Oxfordshire.

But some of the appearances are personal names, although almost certainly jocular nicknames rather than proper names. There is Godewin Clawecuncte (1066), Simon Sitbithecunte (1167), Gunoka Cunteles (1219), John Fillecunt (1246), Robert Clevecunt (1302), and Bele Wydecunthe (1328).

As a stand-alone word, its earliest recorded appearance is in the version of The Proverbs of Hendyng contained in an early fourteenth-century manuscript:

Þe maide þat ȝevit hirsilf alle
Oþir to fre man, oþir to þralle,
Ar ringe be set an hande,
And pleiit with þe croke and wiþ þe balle,
And mekit gret þat erst was smalle,
Þe wedding got to sconde.
“Ȝeve þi cunte to cunni[n]g,
And crave affetir wedding.”

(The maiden that gives herself completely
Either to a free man, or to a slave,
Before a ring is set on a hand,
And plays with the staff and with the ball,
And makes great that which before was small,
Goes to the wedding in disgrace.
“Give your cunt over to wisdom,
And desire after the wedding.”

Alternatively, by eliminating the comma the final two lines could read “Give your cunt over to [carnal] knowledge and lust only after the wedding.”

And you thought the European Middle Ages were just about knights, dragons, and God.

Use of the word as an epithet for a woman, carrying the connotation of promiscuity, dates to the seventeenth century. It appears in the entry in Samuel Pepys’s Diary for 1 July 1663:

After dinner we fell in talking, Sir J. Mennes and Mr. Batten and I—Mr. Batten telling us of a late triall of Sir Charles Sydly the other day, before my Lord Chief Justice Foster and the whole Bench—for his debauchery a little while since at Oxford Kates; coming in open day into the Balcone and showed his nakedness—acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture and, as it were, from thence preaching a Mountebanke sermon from that pulpitt, saying that there he hath to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him—a thousand people standing underneath to see and hear him.

Many editions of Pepys’s Diary bowdlerize the word to women, an excellent example of one the problems historical linguists and lexicographers have in researching words like this one.

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Sources:

The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix.

Birch, Walter de Gray. Cartularium Saxonicum, vols. 2 and 3 of 3. London: Whiting, 1887–93, Birch 596, 2:246 and Birch 1054, 3:273. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2009.

Latham, Robert and William Matthews, eds. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 4 of 11. London: HarperCollins, 1971, 209. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. cunte n., gropen v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. cunt, n.

Varnhagen, H. “Zu Mittelenglischen Gedichten, 11, Ze Den Sprichwörten Hending’s.” Anglia, vol. 4, 1881, 190. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg.1.1, fol. 479v

craps

A craps table

30 July 2020

Every now and then when researching a word, you turn up a rather interesting historical character. And in the case of craps, there is not one, but two such men.

Craps is, of course, a dice game, but its name is an odd one. The origin of the game’s name is somewhat uncertain, but it is most likely related to a term used in an older dice game. And we do know that it has nothing to do with crap.

The present-day game of craps is a descendent of an older dice game called hazard, and in hazard a roll of two, the lowest roll, is known as crabs. This term comes from the two pips on the dice, which are said to resemble either the crustacean or crab apples. The term crabs dates to at least 9 January 1768 when the Earl of Carlisle uses it in a letter to our first interesting historical figure, George Augustus Selwyn:

I hope you have left off hazard. If you are still so foolish, and will play, the best thing I can wish you is that you many win and never throw crabs.

Selwyn (1719–91) was a member of the British Parliament, a backbencher—he sat in the House of Commons for forty-four years without ever making a speech. He was member of the notorious Hellfire Club, a group of high society “gentlemen” who reveled in taking part in activities that were generally considered immoral. On the surface, Selwyn was an unambitious, charming wit. He was expelled from Oxford University for mocking the holy communion. He was also an inveterate gambler who happily shrugged off his losses. But he purportedly harbored a taste for the macabre and was said to have enjoyed attending public executions—allegedly sometimes cross-dressing as a woman to disguise himself and, with the hooped skirt, his erections. The darker rumors were that he was a necrophiliac and that he bribed undertakers so he could visit the corpses. On his deathbed, Henry Fox, the first Baron Holland, is recorded as saying, “the next time Mr. Selwyn calls shew him up. If I am alive I shall be delighted to see him, and if I am dead he will be delighted to see me.” But otherwise he seemed to have little other sexual interest in women or in men, although some claim he was homosexual and an earlier version of the Dictionary of National Biography says that “his fondness for children was, however, extreme.” After his death, his friends claimed these darker rumors were slanders by those who did not like him. How much of his alleged sexual proclivities are true will probably never be known.

This is all, however, just an interesting aside.

The name craps for the variant of hazard that we know today first appears in New Orleans. The variant was the invention of our second historical personage, Jean-Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville. A descendant of French nobility, Bernard de Marigny was born into wealth in Louisiana. As a teenager, his guardian feared he was developing dissolute habits, and de Marigny was sent to England learn how to be a gentleman. Instead, once there he learned how to gamble and became particularly fond of hazard. He brought the game back to New Orleans with him, altering the rules to his liking. He would spend his life as a land developer and speculator and serving in the Louisiana state senate, but his passion was always dice, and he would blow through several fortunes on his way to dying impoverished.

The name craps is first recorded in 1843, although since this is some time after de Marigny introduced the game to New Orleans, antedatings are likely to be found, especially in writing from New Orleans, particularly works in French. The earliest use I’m aware of is by Jonathan Green (no connection to the slang lexicographer that I’m aware of), who wrote of the evils of the game in his 1843 book An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling:

The Game of Craps
This is a game lately introduced into New Orleans and is fully equal to faro in its vile deception and ruinous effects.

And a few years later, the Charleston Courier in South Carolina, on 28 May 1845, reprints this story which had appeared in the New Orleans Bee:

On Tuesday night, Captain Youennes of the First Municipality Police, paid a visit to a room in the St. Fouis Hotel Building, and there found Adolphe Poulard, whom he arrested on a charge of keeping a banking game called “craps.” On making a search $225 30, eighty-five checks, two dice boxes and nine dice were found in the drawer of the gaming table, all of which, with the table were seized.

The most likely explanation for the name craps is that it is simply a variation on crabs, the pronunciation shifting as it moved from English to Louisiana French and then back into English.

A more complex explanation, which is less likely but cannot be ruled out, is that craps is a shortening of crapaud, literally toad in French, and a derogatory epithet for French people. This explanation would have English citizens of New Orleans looking down upon the Creoles who played the game, and called it craps after them.

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Sources:

Carter, Philip. “Selwyn, George Augustus.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3 January 2008.

Charleston Courier (South Carolina), 28 May 1845, 2. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green, Jonathan H. An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling. Cincinnati: U.P. James, 1843, 88. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

“Letter,” Earl of Carlisle to George Selwyn, 9 January 1768. In John Henage Jesse. George Selwyn and His Contemporaries, vol. 2 of 4. London: Richard Bentley, 1843, .238. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. craps, n., crab, n.1.

Photo credit: Lisa Brewster, 2007. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.