atomic bomb / a-bomb

Mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right), 6 and 9 August 1945

6 August 2020

Seventy-five years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The number of people killed by the bomb is not known with any certainty but was probably in the range of 90,000–150,000. Three days later, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, killing another 40,000–80,000. But while the actual thing was new, the term atomic bomb was not. The idea of an atomic bomb and the destruction it could cause had been around a lot longer.

As with many technological terms, the phrase atomic bomb appears in science fiction before it does in reality. The first known use of atomic bomb is in H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free, published in 1914 before the outbreak of the First World War. In the novel, Wells depicts a world war fought with atomic bombs dropped from airplanes. Wells wrote this before the process of nuclear fission and its accompanying radioactivity were fully understood, so his technical description of the weapon is scientifically implausible, but he was eerily prescient in depicting what a war fought with such weapons would be like:

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were conbustibles [sic] whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science had burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.

Wells’s novel was widely read and the idea of an atomic bomb well known in the first half of the twentieth century, even if science was playing catch-up with science fiction. The idea was so popular, that a 1921 fashion-industry journal could cavalierly discuss how the destruction of Paris by an atom bomb would benefit American apparel makers, incidentally the first use of this clipped form that I know of:

No form of protection will prevent our dressmakers from making use of the fashion service provided by Paris. We may close our frontiers against European textiles, the samples will nevertheless reach our market and be copied. Even the highest duties have not prevented American women of fashion to buy the expensive imported gowns. So there is no use of fighting a situation which has become an institution and for which there is no remedy excepting that of blowing up Paris by an atom bomb as forecasted by H.G. Wells some years ago.

In December 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch discovered and named nuclear fission. And in August 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, recognizing the potential for the realization of an atomic bomb and the dangers should Nazi Germany acquire one, wrote their famous letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt urging the United States to not fall behind in the area of nuclear research. This was the beginning of the Manhattan Project to develop such a weapon. That project would get fully underway in 1942, after the United States had entered the Second World War.

But, prompted by Einstein and Szilard, the U.S. government had begun experimentation with uranium prior to 1942, and this was reported by newspapers in 1941, before the full security clampdown on the project had begun. The report, distributed by the United Press syndicate and based on a Swedish newspaper report, exaggerates the effects of early nuclear weapons and the state of the U.S. program at that date, but it does reflect that the government was starting to take over the program from various university labs where it had resided:

U.S. Testing “Atom Bomb”

Stockholm, Aug. 28 (U.P.).—The newspaper Tidningen today published a London report that American scientists were experimenting with a 10-pound uranium “atom bomb” capable of blasting a hole five-eighths of a mile deep and 25 miles wide, wrecking buildings over a 100-mile area.

The dispatch said the United States Government had offered to take over the laboratory for the final experiments with the bomb, which had already begun.

Given wartime secrecy, there aren’t many mentions of atomic bombs in print between 1942 and August 1945. The term re-emerges on 7 August 1945 after the bombing of Hiroshima is made public. The abbreviation A-bomb appears at this point, as does use of atom bomb and atomic bomb as verbs. From a 7 August 1945 Associated Press report:

[General Carl A.] Spaatz announced there would be a leaflet campaign to let the Japanese people know they had been atom-bombed and could expect more in the future.

Since the invention of the more devastating hydrogen bomb, powered by nuclear fusion, the terms atomic bomb and A-bomb have been generally restricted to the older, fission weapons, and today tend to be used in historical contexts.

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Sources:

Alwyn-Schmidt, L.W. “Fashions, Textiles and Dyes.” Color Trade Journal, 9.1, July 1921, 2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“More Bombs of the Same Kind Ready.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8 August 1945, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. a-bomb, n., atom bomb, n. atomic bomb, n., atom bomb, v., atomic bomb, v.

“U.S. Testing ‘Atom Bomb.’” Daily News (New York). 29 August 1941, 45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wells, H.G. The World Set Free. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1914, 114. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credits: George R. Caron, tail gunner on Enola Gay (Hiroshima) and Charles Levy, on board observing B-29 aircraft The Great Artiste (Nagasaki), August 1945, U.S. Department of Energy photos

pork roll / Taylor Ham

Evening view of the bridge over the Delaware River at Trenton with the iconic “Trenton Makes, the World Takes” sign replaced with “Pork Roll”

5 August 2020

Sometimes the fiercest debates are over the smallest stakes. Such is the case with the battle between pork roll and Taylor Ham. If you’re not from New Jersey, you’re probably unfamiliar with pork roll, a pork-based, processed meat product that looks like Canadian bacon (a.k.a. back bacon or pea meal bacon), but tastes nothing like that product. The debate is over what the proper name is.

From a linguist’s point of view, both names are perfectly valid. Pork roll is a generic name for the product, while Taylor is a brand name for the product made by Taylor Provisions of Trenton, but one that is often used by the public as a generic term. Technically, the brand name is Original Taylor Pork Roll, but it is commonly referred to as Taylor Ham. There are other manufacturers of pork roll, the most famous being the Case company, also of Trenton, which has been making the product since 1870. Common wisdom, confirmed by unscientific surveys (there are no scientific ones; pork roll studies is a sadly underfunded field), is that the name Taylor Ham predominates in the northern and northwestern counties of the state, and pork roll is the more common term in central and south Jersey. (Full disclosure: having been born and bred in south Jersey, I grew up knowing it as pork roll.)

A pork roll, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich

According to the Taylor company, pork roll as we know it was created in 1856 by John Taylor of Hamilton Square, near Trenton. I have found references to Taylor as a Trenton-based seller of provisions from that period, but earliest use of the term pork roll that I have found is from an advertisement in the Montreal Gazette of 7 November 1878:

Daily Supplies
Fresh Oysters!
Campbell’s Beef Hams!
Pork Rolls!     Tongues!
Breakfast Bacon!

Of course, it’s impossible to say if this refers to the New Jersey delicacy or to some other meat product.

But there is an unambiguous reference to Taylor Prepared Ham being sold in Baltimore in 1896. From an ad in the Sun on 31 October 1896:

To the Trade.

We are now receiving daily shipments of TAYLOR’S PREPARED HAM. If you cannot have your orders filled by jobbers, send to us direct for prompt attention.

JNO. SCHOENKWOLF & CO., 104 S. Howard st.

A 1910 trademark dispute between Taylor Provisions and a competitor outlines the history of the product name. In the case, Taylor Provisions tried to get an injunction against the competitor for trademark violations; they lost:

The complainant is successor to one John Taylor, who conducted a provision business for a considerable time and placed upon the market a food article made of pork, packed in a cylindrical cotton sack or bag in such form that it could be quickly prepared for cooking by slicing without removal from the bag. This preparation was known as “Taylor’s Prepared Ham,” but with the passage of the pure food law by the Congress of the United States it became necessary to change the label of this article in order to avoid a violation of the statute, as it did not consist of ham. The complainant therefore adopted the name “Pork Roll,” and has had large sales of the article under the name of “Taylor’s Pork Roll,” or “Trenton Pork Roll.”

As the court noted, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act forced the Taylor company to drop the ham from the name of the product and call it pork roll. But the public, undeterred by government edict, continues to refer to it as Taylor Ham to this day. An 18 October 1906 advertisement in the Trenton Evening Times reflects this change in the official name of Taylor’s product:

Pork Roll

Taylor’s Sugar Cured. Similar to the prepared ham sold last year under this brand. Yet much improved in every way. First of the season. Per lb. ... 17c.

And two weeks later, another ad in the same paper on 1 November 1906 touts a competing product:

Our own make pork roll (formerly called prep. ham); lb. ... 16c.

If you’re not from New Jersey, it’s impossible to fathom the ardor that is generated over whether pork roll or Taylor Ham is the proper name. Perhaps the only fiercer debate is over whether or not Central Jersey exists.

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Sources:

Advertisement. The Gazette (Montreal), 7 November 1878, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Advertisement. The Sun (Baltimore), 31 October 1896, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Advertisement. Trenton Evening Times, 18 October 1906, 8, NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Advertisement. Trenton Evening Times, 1 November 1906, 4, NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Hyman, Vicki. “How New Jersey Saved Civilization: Taylor Ham.” NJ.com, 2 April 2019.

Stirling, Stephen. “The Results of Our Great Pork Roll vs. Taylor Ham Battle Divide N.J.” NJ.com, 16 January 2019.

“Taylor Provision Co. v. Gobel.” (Circuit Court, E. D. New York. 15 August 1910). The Federal Reporter, vol. 180. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1910, 939. Google Books.

Photo credit: Pork roll, egg, & cheese sandwich, Austin Murphy, 2009, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license; Trenton bridge, The Pork Roll Store, Allentown, NJ.

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.