dollar

1548 woodcut depicting silver mining in Joachimstal

18 August 2020

The dollar is the standard unit of monetary currency in the United States and several other countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Fiji. But where does the word come from?

Dollar is a clipping of Joachimstaler, which in turn is from Joachimstal (literally Joachim’s valley) in Bohemia, now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic. In 1519, a silver mine there started minting coins called Joachimstalers or simply Talers. The name taler was soon applied to a variety of coins minted throughout Europe.

The word makes its English appearance in a 1553 letter by Richard Morysin and Thomas Chamberlayne, in which they refer to the European coin:

The Duke of Wirtemberg is agreed w[ith] Magister Teutonici Ordinis, so that the Duke shall have for his charges 66000 dalers; but the King of Rome will not as yet agree w[ith] Wirtemberg: The sute is now seaven years old; thes Princes wold fain end it.

But of the various coins that took the name taler or dollar, the most significant for our purposes was the Spanish peso, also known as a piece of eight, because it was worth eight reals. Here is an early English language reference to this coin as a dollar in Barnabe Rich’s 1583 Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession. Phillip refers to Phillip II of Spain:

Many of our yong Gentlemenne vseth now adaies, in the wearyng of their apparell, whiche is rather to followe a fashion that is newe (be it neuer so foolishe) then to bee tied to a more decent custome, that is cleane out of vse: Sometime wearyng their haire freeseled so long, that makes them looke like a water Spaniell: Sometymes so shorte like a newe shorne Sheepe: Their Beardes sometimes cutte rounde like a Philippes Daler: Somtimes square like the Kinges hedde in Fishestreate: Sometymes so nere the skinne, that a man might iudge by his face, the Gentleman had had verie pilde lucke

The Spanish coin circulated widely throughout both North and South America for several centuries, and by the time of the American War of Independence was the most common coin in circulation in the English North American colonies. As a result, in 1778 Thomas Jefferson drafted legislation authorizing the new government of the United States to issue banknotes based on the Spanish peso:

Be it enacted by the General assembly that it shall be lawful for the Treasurer to issue treasury notes in dollars or parts of a dollar for any sum which may be requisite for the purposes aforesaid in addition to the sums issuable by former acts of assembly.

Two-dollar U.S. Federal Reserve note

Six years later, in April 1784, Jefferson would suggest dollar as the name for the country’s own coinage:

The Unit, or Dollar, is a known coin, and the most familiar of all, to the minds of the people. It is already adopted from South to North? has identified our currency, and therefore happily offers itself as a Unit already introduced.

(The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1782 as the date for this note by Jefferson, and it also has a different volume and page number of Jefferson’s Works. There is clearly an error somewhere, but whether it is by the OED or by Ford, the compiler of the edition of Jefferson’s Works that I consulted, I cannot tell. In any case, there is no disputing the text or authorship of the quotation, only the exact date.)

So, the almighty dollar gets its name from a sixteenth-century silver mine in an obscure valley in what is now the Czech Republic, via the Spanish colonial empire.

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Sources:

Jefferson, Thomas. “Draft of a Bill for Providing a Supply for the Public Exigencies,” 20 May 1778. In Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 2 of 12, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, 327. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States,” April 1784. In Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4 of 12, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, 300. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Morysin, Richard and Thomas Chamberlayne. “Letter to the Privy Council” (1553). In Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History, Biography, and Manners, vol. 1 of 3, London: C. Nicol, 1791, 166. Google Books.

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

Rich, Barnabe. Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession. London: J. Kingston for Robart Walley, 1583. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credits: “Bergwerk Sankt Joachimsthal,” Wikimedia Commons, public domain; U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, 2003.

dirt poor / filthy rich

17 August 2020

Dirt poor is an expression that dates to the late nineteenth century United States. It means, of course, very poor. But why the dirt?

It would seem the phrase originally referred to a farmer who owned their land, perhaps with a mortgage, but had little actual cash on hand. In this way, it would be akin to the present-day house poor, referring to someone who owns a nice home, but because of mortgage payments has little in the way of discretionary funds.

The concept, but not the phrase itself, can be seen in this line, which appeared in the Press and Daily Dakotaian of 2 July 1883. Bismarck here refers to the city, now the capital of North Dakota, not the German politician:

Bismarck is rich in prairie dirt, but poor in actual legal tender.

A few months later in the Chicago Daily Tribune of 14 October 1883, the phrase appears in a headline:

“Dirt Poor.” A Board of Trade Scalper Dabbles in Printing-Company Stock, with Bad Results.

The article, which does not use the phrase itself, is about an investor who swaps valuable stock for worthless land, and so dirt poor here literally refers to worthless land, not a state of poverty. But the fact the phrase is in quotation marks hints that the editors are engaging in word play, and the phrase dirt poor was already in oral circulation and known to their readers.

The earliest use I have found of dirt poor clearly used to mean very poor is from a May 1890 story, “Mark’s Substitute,” by Velma Melville. The relevant passage is about a man who pays for a substitute to take his place in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War and later regrets it. The story was syndicated and appears in a number of newspapers across the United States:

“I bet if I was him I’d enlist first chance now ‘nd get my money back,” he continued.
“Everybody ain’t so fond of a dollar, nor so itchen for a fight as you be,” responded his wife, in the shrill treble she always used in addressing him.
“I ain’t no coward, none of the Moselys be,” he retorted.
“Neither be the Weidmans, Dick Mosely, but they’ve got sense enough to look out for number one. They ain’t dirt poor.”

Another early use from a syndicated story can be found in Mary Glascock’s 1893 “Under the Pines,” which again connects the phrase to a farm:

Me and mother farmed our ground ourselves and we’ve always been dirt poor; but me and Bill was always happy.

The bit of internet lore titled “Life in the 1500s” has been floating about cyberspace for decades. It claims that dirt poor dates to Elizabethan England where finished floors could only be afforded by the wealthy. This claim, like everything else in the piece, is utterly false.

Dirt poor is also not directly related to filthy rich. The use of filthy as an intensifier meaning extremely and offensively so is older. Filthy drunk dates to at least June 1827, when the Messenger for the Holston Conference reprinted the following from the New York Enquirer (I haven’t been able to find the original piece):

Within the present week, in a village not many miles from this city, at noonday, we saw two individuals staggering through the middle of the street most filthy drunk. Upon enquiry, we learned that one was about the wealthiest person in the place, worth considerably above $100,000, and that the other was the Postmaster! Can any thing be more shameful?

But filthy rich doesn’t appear until 9 November 1905, when it appears in the Iola Daily Register (Kansas):

It may be just as well hereafter not to wonder who those filthy rich people are speeding by in the ski-doodle cart.

It’s possible, of course, that the coining of filthy rich was influenced by the earlier dirt poor, but the older use of filthy as an intensifier indicates that it was not coined entirely in opposition to dirt poor.

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Sources:

“‘Dirt Poor.’ A Board of Trade Scalper Dabbles in Printing-Company Stock, with Bad Results.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 October 1883, 16. ProQuest.

Glascock, Mary Willis. “Under the Pines.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, vol. 22, no. 128, August 1893, 151. ProQuest.

“Intemperance.” Messenger for the Holston Conference (Knoxville, TN), 16 June 1827. ProQuest.

Melville, Velma Caldwell. “Mark’s Substitute: A Decoration Day Sketch.” The True Northerner (Paw Paw, MI), 28 May 1890. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2016, s.v. filthy, adj., n. and adv.

Press and Daily Dakotaian (Yankton, Dakota Terr., SD), 2 July 1883, 1. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

devil to pay

14 August 2020

The phrases the devil to pay and hell to pay are based on a rather obvious metaphor, that of a Faustian bargain or payment for sins committed

Of the two, the devil to pay is older. It’s first recorded in a fifteenth century macaronic poem appearing in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 112v. That manuscript is most famous for containing one of the copies of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, but this anonymous lyric appears in the manuscript after its better-known companion. The poem condemns women who gossip in church instead of listening to the mass, and features a demon named Tutivillus, who records the names of such sinners in a book. Tutivillus more famously appears in the c. 1470 play Mankind. But here the poem opens with the lines:

Tutiuillus, þe deuyl of hell,
He wryteþ har names soþe to tel,
ad missam garulantes.

Better wer at tome for ay,
Þan her to serue þe deuil to pay,
sic vana famulantes.

(Tutivillus, the devil of hell,
He writes down their names, truth be told,
[who] chatter during mass.

It would be better to remain at home forever,
Than their deserving the devil to pay,
thus [they are] attending in vain.)

[My translation here assumes tome, which appears in both Brown and the older Wright edition, is a transcription error for home. Unfortunately, the Bodleian has not made this folio of the manuscript available online, so I cannot check the manuscript itself. Otherwise, tome is nonsensical here.]

The phrase appears again in a 1703 piece of epistolary fiction, A Continuation or Second Part of the Letters from the Dead to the Living. In this work the devil to pay is used both literally, referring to damnation, and metaphorically. First the literal:

Don’t you know damnation pays every Man’s Scores, and tho’ we Tick’d in the other World for Subsistence, ‘twas not with a design to cheat you or any body else, for we knew we should have the Devil to pay one time or other.

And then the metaphorical:

In this manner we spent the Evening as merrily as so many Tars under the Tropicks, over their Forfeitures, till at last we had the Devil to pay with empty pockets.

The variant hell to pay appears by 1758 in the poem The Miscellaneous and Whimsical Lucubrations of Lancelot Poverty-Struck. Here it is used literally:

The grand Contrast my Muse shall tell,
‘Twixt the Hellish John, and John of Hell;
Before that either gain’d the Day,
By Heaven! there was Hell to pay.

The Duke of Wellington also uses hell to pay in a pair of dispatches from Spain in 1811. In a dispatch to Marshal W.C. Beresford on 28 August 1811 he writes:

I have no doubt that unless the design has been altered since the end of June and beginning of July, we shall have the Emperor in Spain and hell to pay before much time elapses.

And in a letter to Henry Wellesley on 16 October 1811 he says:

We hear that there is hell to pay at Cadiz; but I do not understand about what.

The phrase the devil to pay is commonly touted to have a nautical origin, with it being a clipping of the devil to pay and no pitch hot. Alexander Hamilton, not the man who was the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and posthumous Broadway star but a Maryland doctor from a generation earlier, is the first one to record this particular variant. It appears in his 1774 Gentleman’s Progress:

There was a necessity for the first to bear with the stupidity of his satire and for the others to admire his pseudosophia and quaintness of his speeches and , att [sic] the same time, with their blocks, to turn the edge and acuteness of his wit. He dealt much in proverbs and made use of the one which I thought pritty [sic] significant when well applied. It was the devil to pay and no pitch hot? An interrogatory adage metaphorically derived from the manner of sailors who pay their ship’s bottoms with pitch. I back’d it with great cry and little wool, said the devil when he shore his hogs, applicable enough to the ostentation and clutter he made with his learning.

Smith and Belcher’s 1867 The Sailor’s Word-Book defines this variant thusly:

DEVIL TO PAY AND NO PITCH HOT. The seam which margins the waterways was called the “devil,” why only caulkers can tell, who found it sometimes difficult for their tools. The phrase, however, means service expected and no one ready to perform it. Impatience, and naught to satisfy it.

Since it appears some 300 years after the first known appearance of the shorter the devil to pay, it clearly is not the origin. And, in fact, the sense of devil meaning a ship’s seam only appears in this this phrase; it’s not known to have been used generally. It would seem this is version is playful variation on the older phrase, not its origin.

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Sources:

Brown, Carleton, ed. “On Chattering in Church.” Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, 277.

A Continuation or Second Part of the Letters from the Dead to the Living. London: 1703, 124 and 138. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Hamilton, Alexander. Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1744). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, 83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Miscellaneous and Whimsical Lucubrations of Lancelot Poverty-Struck. London: 1758, 84. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. devil, n.; June 2008, s.v. hell, n. and int.

Smyth, W. H. and E. Belcher. The Sailor’s Word-Book (1867). Almonte, Ontario: Algrove, 2004, 245.

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of. The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, K.G. During his Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France. From 1799 to 1818, vol. 8. London: John Murray, 1837, 227 and 340.

denim / jeans

Figure from the 1873 patent application for riveted blue jeans filed by Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss

13 August 2020

In present-day parlance, denim and jean or jeans are pretty much synonymous, referring to twilled, cotton cloth. Both words were also originally toponyms, or names of places, but different places and they once denoted different materials.

Of the two, jeans is older, dating to Middle English, where Gene or Jene referred to Genoa, the Italian city. Genoa was known for producing fustian, a thick, double-twilled cotton cloth, called jene (or geane) fustian and shortened to just jene or geane. The first use in English that we know of is from John Fortescue’s The Comodytes of Englond, written sometime before 1451, with a surviving copy from before 1500 in Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 593. Fortescue describes the products coming out of Spain, in particular out of Castile. This particular reference to geayne could be to cloth in the style of Genoese fustian, or perhaps to genuine Genoese fustian with the Spanish acting as middlemen:

And owte of the kynges londe of Spayne cummythe goode dyght merchandyse, as owte of Castyll, Calyse, and Byskey the whiche three Contreys longe to hym, for owte of Castyll cummyth most plenty of

1 Oyle, 2 Wyne, 3 Salte, 4 Honye, 5 Wexe, 6 Conyfell, 7 Geayne, Cordewayne.

(And out of the king’s land of Spain comes good, finished merchandise, as out of Castille, Galicia, and Biscay, which three countries belong to him, for out of Castille comes a considerable amount of:

1 oil, 2 wine, 3 salt, 4, honey, 5 wax, 6 rabbit hide, 7 jean, leather)

In contrast, denim is a relatively more recent import into English. It is an Anglicization and clipping of the French serge de Nîmes, referring to twilled, woolen cloth, or serge, coming from the city of Nîmes. The earliest known English use of the phrase, in the form Serge Denim, appears in Edward Hatton’s 1695 The Merchant’s Magazine, sort of a handbook for would-be businessmen. Here he gives an example of an inventory entry:

Item. I have at Aleppo, consigned to Gilbert Gainwell my Factor there, these Norwich Wares remaining unsold, viz.
18 Serge Denims that cost 6 l. each,   108∷0∷0
30 Grograms at 3 l. per piece———— 90∷0∷0
40 Barateens at 3 l. 5 s. each————130∷0∷0
88 pieces in all, which cost——————————328:00:00

By 1771, the cloth was simply being called denim, as can be seen in this advertisement for a bankruptcy auction from 4 December of that year:

The whole genuine, large, and valuable stock of Meß. LAWRENCE and HARRISON, of White Horse-yard, Drury-lane, woollen-drapers and mens mercers, bankrupts. The lease of the premises and shop-fixtures will be put up Tomorrow, precisely at two o’clock; consisting of about
[...] shammy linings, padua serges, silk serges, denims, everlastings, flannels, bays [...] and various other articles.

And a few years after that, we see denim used to refer to cotton cloth. From a notice asking Londoners to be on the lookout for a criminal from 24 May 1777:

Public-Office, Bow Street,
May 23, 1777
WHEREAS JOSHUA CROMPTON, late a Sheriff’s and Marshalsea Court Officer, stands charged on oath before Sir JOHN FIELDING, on a violent suspicion of FORGERIES, to a very considerable amount.
[...]
The said Joshua Crompton [...] is supposed to be dressed in a round bob wig with two culs, or a club wig, a dark chocolate brown fly frock, with large white buttons of a sun pattern, a dark brown and orange striped Manchester velveret waistcoat, with buttons the same colour, a pair of drab coloured cotton denim breeches, with garters of the same, and new boots.

So that’s how the names of two cities, known for producing different types of textiles, became synonyms in English.

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Sources:

Fortescue, John. “The Comodytes of Englond.” The Works of John Fortescue, vol. 1 of 2. London: 1869. 553. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), 4 December 1771, 1. Gale News Vault.

General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer (London), 24 May 1777, 1. Gale News Vault.

Hatton, Edward. The Merchant’s Magazine: or Trades-man’s Treasury. London: Chr. Coningsby, 1695, 159. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. denim, n., jean, n.

Image credit: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Patent #139,121, 1873.

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.