dark and stormy night

12 August 2020

The phrase “It was a dark and stormy night...” has become synonymous with bad and melodramatic writing. Cartoonist Charles Schulz of Peanuts fame had Snoopy habitually starting novels with this line.

12 July 1965 Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz in which Snoopy starts writing a novel with the opening line “It was a dark and stormy night.”

The line is generally understood as coming from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, the opening lines of which read:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man evidently of the lowest orders was wending his solitary way.

The line is so clichéd that a famous annual “bad writing” contest is named after its author, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. But this is somewhat unfair. The line was already a cliché in Bulwer-Lytton’s day, and he was having a bit of fun of it. The phrase dark and stormy night appears in numerous works that predate Bulwer-Lytton’s novel.

An early appearance is in a poem by Edward Lord Herbert published in 1665:

Our life is but a dark and stormy night,
To which sense yields a weak and glimmering light;
While wandring Man thinks he discerneth all,
By that which makes him but mistake and fall.

There is this from John Arbuthnot’s 1712 John Bull Still in His Senses: Being the Third Part of Law is a Bottomless-Pit, which incidentally, is the first appearance of the character of John Bull https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/john-bull:

Tho’ there were some that stuck out to say, that Signiora Bubonia and Jack rail’d at one another, only the better to hide an Intrigue; and, that Jack had been found with Signiora under his Cloak, carrying her home in a dark stormy Night.

Or this from Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 A Sicilian Romance:

The man replied, that on a very dark and stormy night, about a week before, two persons had come to the cottage, and desired shelter. That they were unattended, but seemed to be persons of consequence in disguise.

Or this from Edward Anderson’s poem The Sailor, published c. 1800:

Altho’ we trembling stand at every blast,
High seas arise, yet glad to move so fast;
For, as the gale increases more and more,
It wafts us quicker to our native shore,
This cheers us in the dark and stormy night,
When neither moon nor stars do give us light.

So, the opening to Bulwer-Lytton’s book may be overwritten and melodramatic, but he knew exactly what he was doing, much like those who submit entries to the contest that bears his name.

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Sources:

Anderson, Edward. The Sailor. Newcastle:  M. Angus and Sons, 1800?, 2. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Arbuthnot, John. John Bull Still in His Senses: Being the Third Part of Law is a Bottomless-Pit. London: John Morphew, 1712. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. Paul Clifford, vol. 1 of 3. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830, 1–2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Herbert, Edward Lord. “To His Mistress for Her True Picture.” Occasional Verses of Edward Lord Herbert. London: T.R. for Thomas Dring, 1665, 50. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Radcliffe, Ann. A Sicilian Romance, vol. 1 of 2. Dublin: B. Smith for J. Moore, 1791, 188. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Charles Schulz, Peanuts, 12 July 1965.

freeholder

11 August 2020

As of this writing, New Jersey is considering changing the title of its county commissioners. Traditionally, the elected commissioners have served on Boards of Chosen Freeholders. New Jersey is the only state to refer to officials as freeholders. A bill that has passed the state senate and is under consideration in the assembly would rename them commissioners because the title of freeholder as used in New Jersey dates to a period when only white, male landowners could vote or serve in office.

But the word freeholder long predates New Jersey, and any racial connotation is a relatively new addition to the word’s meaning. Originally, a freeholder was simply a landowner, and the term freehold is still used in real estate law. Black’s Law Dictionary defines a freehold as

1. An estate in land held in fee simple, in fee tail, or for term of life; any real-property interest that is or may become possessory. • At common law, these estates were all created by enfeoffment with livery of seisin. 2. The tenure by which such an estate is held. — Also termed freehold estate; estate in freehold; freehold interest; frank-tenement; liberum tenementum.

And it defines a freeholder as:

Hist. (15c) Someone who possesses a freehold.

The fifteenth century date in Black’s is incorrect. The term is even older than that.

Freeholder can be traced back to the Anglo-Latin franca tenans. The use of francus relates to Frank or French and in Anglo-Norman has the sense of free, having the rights of a French person, someone exempt from feudal obligations. So, a franca tenans is literally one who holds tenancy to land free and clear of any obligation. The phrase appears in Anglo-Latin writing by the late twelfth century.

The Latin term is translated into the Anglo-Norman franctenant, which appears by the year 1268 in a charter in which King Henry III makes John, the duke of Brittany, the earl of Richmond as well:

E maundez est a chevalers e a fraunctenaunz delavauntdite cunte ke en totes choses soient entendaunz a lavantdit Johan, & ses heires, cume a lur seignur, si com avant est dit.

(It is commanded to the aforesaid knights and freeholders that in all things they be obedient to the aforesaid John and his heirs, as to their lord, as is said previously.)

Freeholder, therefore, is a calque or loan translation of fraunctenaunz. The English word appears by 1375 when it is used in describing part of the dowry of an Isabel Bardolf:

The thridde parte of the Rent of the seide maner, of ffree holders and bonde holders, iij li. xviij s.

New Jersey’s use of freeholder as an office title dates to the 1776 state constitution, which reads in part:

That on the said Second Tuesday in October yearly & every Year forever (with the Privilege of adjourning from Day to Day as Occasion may require) the Counties shall severally choose one Person to be a Member of the Legislative Council of this Colony, who shall be & have been for one whole Year next before the Election an Inhabitant and Freeholder in the County in which he is chosen, and worth at least one thousand Pounds proclamation Money.

Slavery was legal in New Jersey in 1776, and this constitution effectively limited state office holders to white men of property, although the free- in the word did not originally reflect the state of not being enslaved, but rather to owning land without debt or obligation. Over time, however, people began to reanalyze the free- in reference to slavery and to view its present-day use as inappropriate because it hearkens back to a time when white, male supremacy was the law.

The state’s use of freeholder is a quirky bit of New Jersey arcana, and dropping the term may result in the loss of some bit of the state’s uniqueness. But words and their connotations mean what people think they mean, not what their origins are. Words matter and using a word that has connotations of inequality only serves to reinforce existing inequalities. If enough people view freeholder as problematic, then we should let it go.

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Sources:

1776 State Constitution (New Jersey). New Jersey Department of State.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008, s.v. franctenant.

Black’s Law Dictionary, eleventh edition. Bryan A. Garner, ed. Thomson Reuters: Westlaw, 2019, s.v. freehold, n., freeholder.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. R. E. Latham, D. R. Howlett & R. K. Ashdowne, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. francus. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019. s.v. fre-holder, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, freeholder, n.

Rymer, Thomas. Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae, et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica, Inter Reges Angliae et Alios Quosvis Impeatores, Reges, Pontifices, Principes, vel Communitates, vol. 1 of 4. London: 1816, 476. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tully, Tracey. “A Political Title ‘Born from Racism’ Will Be Eliminated.” New York Times, 10 July 2020.

cyber-

10 August 2020

The combining form cyber- relates to computers and particularly to the internet. It’s a modern coinage based on a Greek root. The first cyber- words were cybernetic and cybernetics, coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1948 from κυβερνήτης (kybernetes, steersman) + -ic. Cybernetic relates to the automatic control, or metaphorical steering, of biological or mechanical systems and cybernetics is the study of such control systems. The same Greek root is also behind the American political term gubernatorial, which relates to political governance of a U.S. state.

From Wiener’s 1949 book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, (actually this is taken from the 1961 second edition, as I don’t have access to the first, but I have no reason to suspect this passage has changed):

I have just spoken of a field in which my expectations of cybernetics are definitely tempered by an understanding of the limitations of the data which we may hope to obtain. There are two other fields where I ultimately hope to accomplish something practical with the aid of cybernetic ideas, but in which this hope must wait on further developments. One of this is the matter of prostheses for lost or paralyzed limbs.

Wiener doesn’t explicitly define cybernetics in his book. But the following definition appears in a New York Herald Tribune article of 5 May 1949:

Those honored were:
[...]
Dr. Norbert Wiener, professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for developing the new science of cybernetics, studying control mechanisms in machines and the human nervous system.

For the next decade, cybernetic and cybernetics remained the only cyber- game in town, but by 1960 the field of study gave birth to cyborg, the melding of human and machine. From the New York Times of 22 May 1960 in an article titled, “Spaceman Is Seen as Man-Machine: Scientists Depict the Human Astronaut as Component of a ‘Cyborg’ System”:

A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one.

The word, cyborg, is a hybrid of two others: “cybernetics,” which is the science of control and information transfer, and “organism.” It was conceived by Manfred E. Clynes and Dr. Nathan S. Kline of the Rockland State Hospital’s research facility in Orangeburg, N.Y.

And this being America, the second cyber- derivative to come along was a tradename. Again, from the New York Times, this time from 15 August 1961:

The Raytheon Company made known today its development of a machine said to be capable of learning by trial and error how to solve problems for which no formula is known.

Two models of the development are undergoing tests here at the advanced development laboratory of the company’s communications and data-processing division. They have been given the trade name of Cybertrons.

Cyber- makes its way into science fiction by 1966 with the appearance of the villainous cybermen in the British television series Doctor Who. The cybermen appear in the four-part episode “The Tenth Planet,” which first aired in October 1966.

Often terms relating to technology appear in science fiction before they appear in actual science. While this is not the case with the combining form cyber-, it is the case with some of the words words created from it. And cyberspace, referring to the online, often virtual, world of the internet, appears in science fiction before the general public was aware of the internet and long before virtual reality became a reality. William Gibson coined the term in a fiction piece he wrote for Omni magazine in July 1982:

I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the “Cyberspace Seven.”

But it would be Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer that cemented cyberspace in the lexicon:

Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for five hours.

Cyber as stand-alone adjective would be in place by 9 March 1992 when it appears in the San Diego Business Journal:

Off comes the helmet, gloves and suit. With the rush of adrenaline still in his blood, Jobe, cyber no more, vows to do better next time.

So, cyber- has moved beyond Wiener’s original conception of control or metaphorical steering and grown to encompass anything having to do with the internet. Its meaning has become divorced from that of its Greek root, but such is the way with words.

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Sources:

Fenton, John H. “A Robot Machine Learns by Error.” New York Times, 15 August 1961, 22. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Lord & Taylor Gives Award to Scientists.” New York Herald Tribune, 5 May 1949, 15. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001: s.v. cyber, adj.; June 2009: s.v. cyber-, comb. form; November 2010: s.v. cybernetic, adj., cyberspace, n.

“Spaceman Is Seen as Man-Machine: Scientists Depict the Human Astronaut as Component of a ‘Cyborg’ System.” New York Times, 22 May 1960, 31. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, second edition. New York: MIT Press and John Wiley and Sons, 1961, 25.

Dago

10 August 2020

Dago is an ethnic slur that fortunately one hears less frequently these days than one once did. Originally an Americanism, it can now be found in most dialects of English. It is a variation on the given name Diego, and was originally applied to Spaniards, gradually expanding to encompass the Portuguese, Italians, and finally any non-Nordic foreigners.

Use of the name Diego to refer to a Spaniard dates to the sixteenth century. There is this by Thomas Nash in 1599 describing the defenses of the port of Yarmouth, England:

They haue towres vpon them sixteene: mounts vnderfonging & enflancking them two of olde, now three, which haue their thundring tooles to compell Deigo Spanyard to ducke, and strike the winde collicke in his paunch, if he praunce to neere them, and will not vaile to the Queene of England.

And there is this by poet John Taylor, written c. 1611. A number of poets and writers had penned verses mocking Thomas Coryat, who in 1608 had written a self-important travelogue of his journey through Europe. Here Taylor summarizes what Henry Poole had to say about Coryat, likening the English Coryat to a Spanish nobleman:

Incipit Henricus Poole.
Next followes one, whose lines aloft doe raise
Don Coriat, chiefe Diego of our daies.
To praise thy booke, or thee, he knowes not whether,
It makes him study to praise both, or neither.
At last, he learnedly lets flie at large,
Compares thy booke vnto a Westerne Barge;
And saies, 'tis pitty thy all worthlesse worke,
In darke obscurity at home should lurke.

This use of Diego can be found throughout the seventeenth century, but then faded from use.

But it popped up again in the nineteenth-century United States as dago. Since the older use of Diego had disappeared, this dago is likely an independent coinage unrelated to the older usage. The first recorded appearance of dago, spelled dego, is in Enoch Wines’s 1832 book Two Years and a Half in the Navy:

The ship was thronged all day with tailors, hatters, shoemakers, and persons who supply the messes with provisions, all begging our patronage in broken English, and inundating us with certificates of character and eulogiums on themselves. These Degos, as they are pleasantly called by our people, were always a great pest when we were in the harbour of Mahon.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. dago n.

Nash, Thomas. Nashes Lenten Stuffe, Containing, The Description and First Procreation and Increase of the Towne of Great Yarmouth in Norffolke. London: Thomas Judson and Valentine Simmes for Nicholas Ling and Cuthbert Burby, 1599, 14. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Dago, n., diego, n.

Taylor, John. All the Workes of Iohn Taylor. London: John Beale for James Boler, 1630, 72. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Wines, Enoch Cobb. Two Years and a Half in the Navy, vol. 1 of 2. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832, 100–01. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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