face

21 September 2020

Face is a word that has many meanings in English, but here I am only going to focus on a few.

The word comes from the Latin facies and could mean one’s literal face or the surface of something, as in the face of the earth. It makes its way into English via the Anglo-Norman face.

One of the first uses in English is from a life of St. Thomas Becket that appears in the South-English Legendary, a collection of hagiographies or saints’ lives. Here is the version from the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108, which was copied c.1300:

Þat face was ȝwyȝt and cler i-nouȝ: and no blod nas þar-inne,
bote fram þe riȝt half of is frount: toward þe left chinne
A small rewe þere was of blode: þat ouer is nose drouȝ;
More blod þar nas in al is face: ase folk i-saiȝ i-nouȝ.

(That face was white and very clear; and no blood was therein,
but from the right half of his front, toward the left chin
There was a small row of blood that drew over his nose;
There was no blood in all of his face, as folk often tell.)

The use of face to mean the surface of something, which had existed in both Latin and Anglo-Norman, isn’t recorded in English until a bit later. From a Wycliffite Bible found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 369, copied sometime before 1382. Here is Isaiah 14:21:

Greithe ȝe his sones to slaȝter, for the wickidnesse of ther fadres; thei shul not togidere rise, ne eritagen the erthe, ne fulfille the face of the roundness of the cite.

(Prepare his sons for slaughter because of the wickedness of their fathers; they shall not rise together, nor inherit the earth, nor fill the face of the earth with the city.)

The corresponding phrase in the Vulgate is neque implebunt faciem orbis civitatum.

The sense of outward appearance or pretense, as in to put on a good face appears in the same manuscript. Here is 2 Corinthians 5:12:

We comenden not vs silf eftsoone to ȝou, but we ȝyuen to ȝou occacioun for to glorie for vs, that ȝe haue to hem that glorien in the face, and not in the herte.

(We commend not ourselves again to you, but we give to you occasion to glory on our behalf, that you have [understanding] of them that glory in the face, and not in the heart.)

The sense of face as reputation or social standing is a much later development, imported from China in the nineteenth century. It’s a calque of two Chinese words, liǎn (face, moral character) and miànzi (face, social prestige). Here is an early use of the phrase found in The Chinese Repository, a collection of English-language documents published in China, from December 1834:

The contrast which is drawn in this paper between the members of the present co-hong and the shameless merchants of former times is a curious specimen of Chinese rhetoric, and shows how much it behooves the present fraternity to have “a tender regard for their face,” lest they should lose their present high reputation for propriety and respectability.

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Sources:

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

“Art. VII. Journal of Occurences: Proclamation Against the Hong Merchants Conniving at and Abetting Vice in Foreigners; Imperial Edict Against Extortions of Hong Merchants,” (December 1834). The Chinese Repository, vol. 3 of 20. Canton: Printed for the Proprietors, 1834, 391. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. facies. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments: With the Apocryphal Books in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, vols. 3 and 4 of 4. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1850, 3:425, 4:381. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Horstmann, Carl. “St. Thomas of Caunterbury.” The Early South-English Legendary. Early English Text Society (EETS). London: N. Trübner, 1887. lines, 2175–78, 169. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. face n.

Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009, s.v. face, n.

evolution

18 September 2020

Charles Darwin will forever be associated with the theory of evolution, but he was not the first to use the word evolution to describe the development of species, nor did he use that word when he first published his ideas on natural selection.

Evolution comes from the Latin evolutio, which meant the unrolling of a scroll. Cicero uses it in his De finibus bonorum et malorum (Regarding the Limits of Good and Evil):

Quid tibi, Torquate, quid huic Triario litterae, quid historiae cognitioque rerum, quid poetarum evolutio, quid tanta tot versuum memoria voluptatis affert?

(What pleasure do you Torquatus, or does Triarius here, receive from literature, from history and learning, from the unscrolling of the poets, from memorizing so many verses?)

There are a number of senses of evolution in English, starting in the early seventeenth century. Most of them relate to a twisting or unfolding motion or to an orderly progression of change, but I’m going to focus on the biological senses.

The first sense of evolution in biology refers to the growth and development of an animal or plant, from egg or seed to mature form. This sense is in place by 1670, when it appears in a review of the book Historiæ generalis insectorum by Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

First, It lays down the Ground of all Natural Changes in Insects; declaring, that by the word Change, is nothing else to be understood but a gradual and natural Evolution and Growth of the parts; not any Metamorphosis or Transformation of them: which Growth is here made to resemble, not only the Increase of other Animals, but also the Budding, Knitting and Spreading of Plants.

Use of evolution to mean the develop of and changes in species also predates Darwin. That sense appears in Charles Lyell’s 1832 Principles of Geology:

Of the truth of the last-mentioned geological theory, Lamarck seems to have been fully persuaded; and he also shews that he was deeply impressed with a belief prevalent amongst the older naturalists, that the primeval ocean invested the whole planet long after it became the habitation of living beings, and thus he was inclined to assert the priority of the types of marine animals to those of the terrestrial, and to fancy for example, that the testacea of the ocean existed first, until some of them, by gradual evolution, were improved into those inhabiting the land.

Darwin didn’t invent the theory of evolution—as with so many scientific breakthroughs, he built upon ideas that were circulating at the time. His key contribution was in describing the mechanism of natural selection. And he didn’t use the word evolution in the first, 1859, edition of his Origin of Species, probably because of the older sense referring to growth and development of an organism. But he did use the word in the sixth, 1873, edition of his book:

At the present day almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form.

And:

Every one who believes in slow and gradual evolution, will of course admit that specific changes may have been as abrupt and as great as any single variation which we meet with under nature, or even under domestication.

Just as Darwin didn’t invent the theory of evolution, he wasn’t the coiner of that phrase. That honor goes to Herbert Spencer, who used it in 1858, the year before Darwin published his version of the theory:

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none. [...] We may safely estimate the number of species that have existed, and are existing, on the Earth, at not less than ten millions. Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that by continual modifications, due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still.

Spencer is also credited with coining the phrase survival of the fittest and was one of the originators of Social Darwinism, the now discredited idea that extends the biological idea into society and ethics.

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Sources:

Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum. H. Rackham, trans. London: W. Heinemann, 1921, 1.7, 26. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species, sixth edition. London: John Murray, 1873, 201. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology, vol 2 of 3. London: J. Murray, 1832, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. evolution, n.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 5. London: John Martin, 1670, 2078. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Spencer, Herbert. “The Development Hypothesis.” Essays—Scientific, Political, and Speculative. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858, 389–90. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

ethnic / social cleansing

17 September 2020

The current use of ethnic cleansing as a euphemism for genocide dates to the early 1990s and the war in the Balkans. But the phrase has antecedents that stretch back over a century. While phrases using cleansing have not always been tantamount to genocide, they often have been euphemisms for pacifying or even displacing the lower classes and undesirable elements in a society.

The calque of the Serbo-Croatian etničko čišćenje first appears in the Washington Post on 2 August 1991:

The Croatian political and military leadership issued a statement Wednesday declaring that Serbia’s “aim ... is obviously the ethnic cleansing of the critical areas that are to be annexed to Serbia.”

The use of similar language in the Balkans dates to the early 1980s, as this use of ethnically clean from the New York Times of 12 July 1982 shows. It’s a calque of the Albanian political slogan Kosova etnikisht e pastër (an ethnically clean Kosovo):

''The nationalists have a two-point platform,'' according to Becir Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, ''first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.''

(The slogan is in Albanian, but it’s disputed whether or not it was a genuine slogan of Albanians in Kosovo or the work of Serbian propagandists intent on fear-mongering.)

Unfortunately, similar euphemisms are older. The Nazis, no surprise, used the term Säuberungsaktion (cleansing process) as a euphemism for genocide, as this translation in the American Political Science Review of April 1936 attests:

In Berlin, for example, there was a cleansing process (Säuberungsaktion), directed against Marxists, Jews, and others who were alleged to be enemies of the state.

And the standalone cleansing as a euphemism for genocide is a bit older. From the same journal of August 1935:

At the same time, municipal administration was purged of Jewish, republican, socialist, and other “unreliable” elements. No statistics are available on the cleansing of the professional civil service.

Even older is the term social cleansing, which dates to the late nineteenth century and refers to improving the material lot of the disadvantaged in society as means to prevent revolution and discord. We have this from the Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin) of 20 April 1887:

The men of honest intentions in the line of reform and improvement are coming to the front, and the blatant, foul-mouthed, blood-seeking frauds and imposters and nihilists are being relegated to the rear. The great social fermentation is going on, and the scum is rapidly being boiled out and slung into the waste hole. The purifying process is progressing admirably. Things will work themselves out all right under the guidance and intelligence of the American people, and the country will be better for the social cleansing it has had.

And this from a December 1895 article on the “Colored Children in the District of Columbia”:

The next two persons interviewed were a gentleman and his wife, who began work for and with the colored people in the old days of the Freedman’s Bureau, and who have been actively engaged in it for thirty years. They seem to have lived and labored through those years firm in the faith that the forces at work for the uplifting and humanity must and will prevail; that with moral and social cleansing will come physical regeneration and the full reward of those how have learned to labor and wait. They attribute the present difficulties to the awful effects of slavery; and hold that beneath skins, black or white, human nature is the same.

And this from the Daily Alaska Dispatch of 28 October 1909:

Those anarchists we have and have had came to us from abroad, where they were bred by reason of abuses against which anarchy is a violent and unreasoning protest. What the world needs is a political and social cleansing of those spots that afford inspiration to this doctrine of chaos.

While ostensibly for the benefit of the poor, such efforts often led to what we know call gentrification and displacement and removal of those whom the programs were supposed to benefit. And there is this, advocating for government spending for social cleansing in the pages of Once a Week of 12 January 1892:

The Reform movement, just inaugurated in New York City, aims to wipe out the slums, and on their sites to lay out parks and playgrounds for the children of the poor; to enlist those millionaires who have no other earthly use for a fraction of their millions in the work of making New York a better place to live in. Government patronage and indorsement and legal sanction, by means of penalties and real estate condemnations, in cases of slums in all large cities, is called for. Rivers and harbors are deepened and repaired by Government appropriations—why not Government appropriations for social cleansing purposes? Men of money will find it in their interest to co-operate in this work. During their lifetime they should do it. They will make money by doing it.

And much later, there is this from the Richmond Times-Dispatch of 2 June 1930:

“In India we find those who worship the plow, because he sees he gets some benefit from the plow.” Said Mr. Brunk. “The carpenter worships his tools, because he gets some benefit from those tools. Worship is the means to the end with those people. The only hope for their social cleansing and the alleviation and banishment of their poverty and ignorance is through the missionary.”

But reformists within the establishment did not have a monopoly on social cleansing. In the early years of the twentieth century, the term also appears in Marxist writing, referring to refer to the toppling of capitalism. We have this from the Socialist Labor Party’s Daily People of 12 September 1905:

Vice tribute is said to be levied in the city as of old. Still, it is impossible to convince the reformers that what is wanted is not reform but revolution. Then a thorough social cleansing will be possible.

And from the same paper on 14 January 1914:

Finally, obedient to the behest that self cleansing is a prerequisite for social cleansing, Union No. 49 begins house-cleaning at home, lays intrepidly and with integrity of purpose the finger upon the serious defects of its own International Union; and urges its fellow wage slaves in the Typographical, as well as in all other unions, to hasten to do likewise, and, by education and, organization, join hands in the requisite joint effort to overthrow the social nightmare of the Capitalist Regimen.

So, while ethnic cleansing is a straight-up euphemism for genocide, the milder social cleansing, while sometimes arising out of the best of intentions, often produced a similar, albeit less extreme, result, that is the purging of undesirable elements from a society.

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Sources:

Daily People (New York), 12 September 1905, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Ford and I.T.U. No. 49.” Daily People (New York), 14 January 1914, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Harden, Blaine. “Croatian Militia Falling Back as Conflict with Serbs Intensifies.” Washington Post, 2 August 1991, A22. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Howe, Marvine. “Exodus of Serbians Stirs Province in Yugoslavia.” New York Times, 12 July 1982, A8. ProQuest.

Lepawsky, Albert. “The Nazis Reform the Reich.” The American Political Science Review, 30.2, April 1936, 346. JSTOR.

Lewis, Herbert W. “Colored Children of the District of Columbia.” The Charities Review, 5.2, 1 December 1895, 95. ProQuest.

“The New Political Party.” Once a Week. 12 January 1892, 2. ProQuest.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. ethnic cleansing, n.; March 2014, s.v. ethnically, adv.

“Pastor Sees India Fertile Field for Missionaries.” Richmond Times-Dispatch (Virginia), 2 June 1930, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Red Flag Crowd.” Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin), 20 April 1887, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Remove the Inspiration.” Daily Alaska Dispatch (Juneau), 28 October 1909, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Wells, Roger H. “Municipal Government in National Socialist Germany.” The American Political Science Review, 29.4, August 1935, 653. JSTOR.

elephant / lions, to see the

16 September 2020

To see the elephant or to see the lions mean to have experience in life, to be worldly and world weary, to have seen so much that nothing surprises. To see the lions is the older phrase and originated in Britain, where it has remained. The elephant version is originally American but has since spread to Britain as well.

To see the lions was originally literal, referring to lions that were kept in the Tower of London. The menagerie in the Tower was established by King John, and the earliest record of lions being kept there is from 1210. The Tower menagerie lasted until the nineteenth century, when the animals were transferred to the London Zoo.

John Smith, of Jamestown and Pocahontas fame, records a literal visit to see the Tower lions in 1629. It’s a bittersweet story of an animal’s continuing love for the man who raised it despite being subsequently kept in the intolerable conditions that prevailed in old zoos:

Those they gave Mr. Archer, who kept them in the Kings Garden, till the Male killed the Female, then he brought it up as Puppy-dog lying upon his bed, till it grew so great as a Mastiffe, and no dog more tame or gentle to them he knew: but being to returne for England, at Safee he gave him to a Merchant of Marsellis, that presented him to the French King, who sent him to King Iames, where it was kept in the Tower seven yeeres: After one Mr. Iohn Bull, then servant to Mr. Archer, with divers of his friends, went to see the Lyons, not knowing anything at all of him; yet this rare beast smelled him before hee saw him, whining, groaning, and tumbling, with such an expression of acquaintance, that being informed by the Keepers how hee came thither; Mr. Bull so prevailed, the Keeper opened the grate, and Bull went in: But no Dogge could fawne more on his Master, than the Lyon on him, licking his feet, hands, and face, skipping and tumbling to fro, to the wonder of all the beholders; being satisfied with his acquaintance, he made shift to get out of the grate. But when the Lyon saw his friend gone, no beast by bellowing, roaring, scratching, and howling, could expresse more rage and sorrow, nor in foure dayes after would he either eat or drinke.

But the metaphorical use of the phrase predates Smith’s literal visit. Robert Greene refers to it as an “old proverb” in 1590 when he tells of a prostitute taking advantage of an inexperienced young man:

This courtisan seeing this countrey Francesco was no other but a meere nouice, & that so newly, that to vse the old prouerb, he had scarce seent the lions. She thought to intrap him and so arrest him with her amorous glances that shee would wring him by the pursse.

The American to see the elephant would seem to have a similar origin, except the reference is to a circus elephant. Asa Green, writing under the pseudonym of Elnathan Elmwood uses the phrase in his 1833 A Yankee Among the Nullifiers:

“Two hundred dollers!” exclaimed the Yankee. “By gauly, what a price! Why they axed me only a quarter of a dollar to see the Elephant and the whole Caravan in New York.”

George Wilkins Kendall gives a full explanation of the phrase and his first encounter with it in his 1844 Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition:

There is a cant expression, “I’ve seen the elephant,” in very common use in Texas, although I had never heard it until we entered the Cross Timbers, or rather the first evening after we had encamped in that noted strip of forest land. I had already seen “sights” of almost every kind, animals of almost every species, reptiles until I was more than satisfied with the number and variety, and felt ready and willing to believe almost anything I might hear as to what I was yet to see; but I knew very well that we were not in elephant range, and when I first heard one of our men say that he had seen the animal in question I was utterly at a loss to fathom his meaning. I knew that the phrase had some conventional signification, but farther I was ignorant. A youngster, however was “caught” by the expression and quite a laugh was raised around a camp fire at his expense.

A small party of us were half sitting, half reclining around some blazing fagots, telling stories of the past and speculating upon our prospects for the future, when an old member of the spy company entered our circle and quietly took a seat upon the ground. After a long breath, and a preparatory clearing of his throat, the veteran hunter exclaimed, “Well, I’ve seen the elephant.”

“The what?” said a youngster close by, partially turning round so as to get a view of the speaker’s face, and then giving him a look which was made up in equal parts incredulity and inquiry.

“I’ve seen the elephant,” coolly replied the old campaigner.

“But not a real, sure-enough elephant, have you?” queried the younger speaker, with that look and tone which indicate the existence of a doubt and the wish to have it promptly and plainly removed.

This was too much; for all within hearing, many of whom understood and could fully appreciate the joke, burst out in an inordinate fit of laughter as they saw how easily the young man had walked into a trap, which, although not set for that purpose, had fairly caught him; and I, too, joined in the merry outbreak, yet in all frankness I must say that I did not fully understand what I was laughing at. The meaning of the expression I will explain. When a man is disappointed in anything he undertakes, when he has seen enough, when he gets sick and tired of any job he may have set himself about, he has “seen the elephant.” We had been buffeting about during the day, cutting away trees, crossing deep ravines and gullies, and turning and twisting some fifteen or twenty miles to gain five—we had finally to encamp by a mud-hole of miserable water, and the spies had been unable to find any beyond—this combination of ills induced the old hunter to remark, “I’ve seen the elephant,” and upon the same principle I will here state that I had by this time obtained something more than a glimpse of the animal myself.

One of the joys of researching word origins is that while we may see many metaphorical elephants, there is a constant joy of discovery that keeps us from becoming jaded and world weary.

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Sources:

Elmwood, Elnathan (a.k.a. Asa Greene). A Yankee Among the Nullifiers. New York: William Stodart, 1833, 31. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Greene, Robert. Greenes Neuer Too Late. London: Thomas Orwin for Nicholas Ling and John Busbie, 1590, 40. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. elephant, n., see, v.

Kendall, George Wilkins. Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844, 108–10. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. elephant, n., lion, n.

Smith, John. The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captaine Iohn Smith. London: John Haviland for Thomas Slater, 1630, 37. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

eighty-six

15 September 2020

Eighty-six or 86 originated in restaurant slang with the meaning that an item was out of stock. It soon also came to mean to eject or not serve a customer. It has passed into general slang to mean to cancel something or someone. Why the number eighty-six was chosen is not known. There are number of explanations floating about, but only two are plausible: that it is rhyming slang or that it is simply an arbitrary assignment of a number in a larger numbering scheme.

The term appears in the late 1920s or early 1930s in the United States. George Manker Watters and Arthur Hopkins’s 1927 play Burlesque contains an exchange where a waiter uses eighty-six, but it seems to be in the opposite sense, that of being able to supply something in short supply, in this case liquor in the days of Prohibition:

Waiter...If you need any Scotch or gin, sir—...My number is Eighty Six...
Skid...Yeah. Eighty Six. I know.
(Waiter exits R. Skid draws enormous flask from pocket.)

The first recorded, clear use of the current slang sense is in a Walter Winchell newspaper column from 23 May 1933:

A Hollywood soda-jerker forwards this glossary of soda-fountain lingo out there... “Shoot one” and Draw one” is one coke and one coffee... “Shoot one in the red!” means a cherry coke... An “echo” is a repeat order... “Eighty-six” means all out of it... “Eighty-one” is a glass of water... “Thirteen” means one of the big bosses is drifting around... A “red ball” is an orangeade.

By 1947 it had become a verb, as can be seen by this item in the 5 February 1947 issue of Variety, which also shows the term had moved beyond the food service industry:

Jeffries Eighty-Sixed?

Hollywood, Feb. 4.

Disk jockeys test their weight tonight when vocalist, Herb Jeffries, is named initial candidate for jockey’s nix list. He failed to show as promised to substitute for Bob McLaughlin, ill, on pilot’s daily show over KLAC, here. McLaughlin will ask his fellows to play no more Jeffries platters, and has had it indicated by organization sparkers, Bill Anson and Peter Potter that they’ll press the measure at regular meeting tonight.

Various explanations have been put forward for the term. The most plausible is that it is rhyming slang for nix. The only issue with this explanation is the existence of a more comprehensive numbering scheme, as evidenced by Winchell’s column. The larger scheme suggests the assignment of this meaning to eighty-six may be arbitrary.

Most of the other proffered explanations aren’t worth mentioning as there is no evidence to support them, but there is one frequently comes up that needs to be dismissed. This explanation holds that eighty-six comes from Chumley’s Bar at 86 Bedford Street in Manhattan. Chumley’s opened as a Prohibition-era speakeasy in 1922 and closed its doors for the last time in 2020, a victim of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the chronology works, there is no evidence tying Chumley’s to the slang term, and the explanation has all the hallmarks of an after-the-fact attempt to make sense of an arcane term.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. eighty-six, adj., eighty-six, v.

“Jeffries Eighty-Sixed?” Variety, 5 February 1947, 46. ProQuest.

Lighter, J. E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House: 1994, s.v. eighty-six.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. eighty-six, n.

Winchell, Walter. “On Broadway” (syndicated column). Times-Union (Albany, New York), 23 May 1933, 8. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.