five by five

6 October 2020

WILLOW:      Don't worry—we're sure to spot her first. Faith's like some big cleavage-y slutbomb walking around all, [imitating Faith] "Check me out, I'm wicked cool, I'm five-by-five."
TARA:            "Five-by-five?" Five-by-five what?
WILLOW:      That's the thing—no one knows.

                                      —Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “This Year’s Girl”

Five by five is a slang adjectival phrase meaning good, fine, all is well. But like Willow in the above quotation, many who use it have no idea where it comes from. But the phrase arises in World War II military jargon. It’s a measure of a radio signal’s strength and clarity on a scale of one to five. Five by five is the best, loud and clear. One by one would be very weak and garbled.

The earliest use I have found in print is from January 1946, but it refers to events during the war. From the U.S. Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck:

"Hello Empire, this is Platform Three. Will be back on station shortly. On our way we spotted about one hundred horses in a small area at Target Square 7276. That is all. Over."

After a brief pause, Jerry's earphones crackled:

"Platform Three, this is Empire. Roger on your last transmission. You will return immediately to Target Square 7276. Adjust Mansfield for battalion time on target. Over."

Jerry sat stunned. He was horrified. They couldn't fire on a bunch of innocent horses! They were staked down, too. It was murder!

The voice coming over the phones again was impatient.

"Empire to Platform Three! Empire to Platform Three! Did you hear my last transmission? Did you hear my last transmission? I say again—."

Jerry came back to life.

"Platform Three to Empire. I hear you loud and clear. I hear you five-by-five. Do you mean to fire on those poor horses?"

Earlier examples are likely to be found in military manuals.

The earliest slang use meaning good or fine that I’ve found is from the flight of the Gemini 4 spacecraft in June 1965. It nicely bridges the transition from radio jargon to general slang. This exchange took place between what I believe to be the recovery ship USS Wasp and astronaut James McDivitt during the craft’s descent (Houston ground control reports the descending craft is communicating through the high-frequency radio, which it cannot receive):

At 10:44 a.m., CST, over Hawaii, descent begins with firing of the maneuvering rockets.
Hawaii control: “Start burn.”

McDivitt: “Affirmative. Am firing.”

On the way down. McDivitt: “We’re five by five up here.”

The NASA public affairs transcript for this moment reads:

This is Gemini Control. Gus Grissom has just raised Jim McDivitt. He came back with “we’re 5 by 5 up here” or something like that, it was a very faint transmission.

Given the large numbers of men who served during the war and the popularity of the space program, it’s no surprise the phrase worked its way into the general lexicon. But by the end of the twentieth century, memory of where five by five came from had faded, leaving people, like the fictional Willow and Tara, wondering where it came from.

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Sources:

Burns, Milton. “Horse of another Color.” Leatherneck, January 1946, 31. ProQuest.

NASA. “Gemini IV PAO Commentary Transcript.” Johnson Space Center History Portal, Tape 183, Page 1, 434.

Petrie, Douglas. “This Year’s Girl.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Michael Gershman, dir. 22 February 2000.

Times Wire Services. “Wisecracking on Gemini 4 Continues Right Up to End.” Shreveport Times (Louisiana), 8 June 1965, 7-A. ProQuest.

fire

5 October 2020

To fire someone is to dismiss them from employment. This use of the verb to fire is a metaphor for discharging a bullet from a gun. But the word itself is much, much older.

The noun fire, meaning combustion, goes back to the Old English fyr. As one might expect, it’s a very common word in the Old English corpus, appearing over 1,600 times. Here’s an example from Beowulf. Hrothgar is speaking to Beowulf at the feast after the warrior has killed Grendel’s mother:

                      Nu is þines mægnes blæd
ane hwile;     eft sona bið
þæt þec adl oððe ecg    eafoþes getwæfeð,
oððe fyres feng,     oððe flodes wylm,
oððe gripe meces,     oððe gares fliht,
oððe atol yldo;                 oððe eagena bearhtm
forsiteð ond forsworceð;     semninga bið
þæt ðec, dryht-guma,     deað oferswyðeð.

(Now, for a time, is the glory of your might: soon disease or blade will separate you from your strength, or the fire’s embrace, or the flood’s welling, or the sword’s grasp, or the spear’s flight, or the horrors of age; or the brightness of your eyes will fail and dim; at last it will be death that overcomes you, warrior.)

The Old English verb fyrian is much rarer, appearing only twice and rather late in the early medieval period. In Old English the verb meant to provide someone with fire. Here’s one of the two instances, from an eleventh-century confessional and penitential text:

Freoge his agene þeowan, and alese æt oðrum mannum heora þeowan to freote, and huru earme gehergode men; and fede þearfan, and scride, husige and firige, baðige and beddige.

(He should free his own slaves, and ransom from other men their slaves in manumission, and especially destitute, harried men; and feed and clothe the poor, house them and [provide them with] fire, bathe and bed them.)

In the early Middle English period, the verb started to acquire more senses. In a life of St. Margaret of Antioch, from c.1200 and appearing in two manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl. 34 and London, British Library, Royal 17.A.27, it is used to mean to inspire, inflame with emotion:

Heh healent godd, wið þe halewende fur of þe hali gast, moncune froure fure min heorte & te lei of þi luue leiti i mine lenden.

(Oh, savior God, with healing of the Holy Ghost, comforter of mankind, fire my heart and let your love burn in my loins.)

The sense meaning to set something alight is recorded later, but one suspects there are older uses that have been lost to time. It appears c.1387 in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in a passage about the fall of Troy:

Synon, which mad was here aspie
Withinne Troie, as was conspired,
What time was a tokne hath fired.

(Synon, who was laying a trap here
Within Troy, as had been treacherously planned,
At that time had fired a beacon.)

Firing a gun appears by the opening years of the sixteenth century. Here are a few lines from William Dunbar’s 1508 poem The Goldyn Targe:

Thai fyrit gunnis with powder violent,
Till that reke raise to the firmament.

(One of the things that bugs me about medieval movies is that almost invariably, when archers are given the command to send their arrows downrange, the command that is given is “Fire!” This, of course, is anachronistic. The medieval command would have been “Loose!”)

By the late nineteenth century, fire was being used to mean to eject a person from the premises, as if they were a bullet from a gun. J.A. Dacus’s 1879 Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States uses the verb this way in this passage:

A lady was introduced as Mrs. Kendrick. Mrs. Kendrick said that if the workingmen had their wages reduced, the hardships fell on their wives and children as much as on themselves, and they should not, therefore, be selfish in their indignation, but divide a little of it with the women. Her auditors listened good naturedly for fifteen minutes, but as there appeared to be no chance for recess, she was advised to “hire a hall,” and the chairman was asked to “fire her out.”

And at about the same time, but recorded slightly later, we see the verb being used to mean to dismiss someone from employment. From the Cincinnati Enquirer of 7 September 1879.

Professional Slang [...] Fired, Banged, Shot Out—When a performer is discharged he is one of the above.

So, there you have it, the history of how to fire came to be used in the field of human resources.

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Sources:

Dacus, J.A. Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States. Chicago: L.T. Palmer, 1877, 415. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. fyr, n., fyrian, v.

Dunbar, William. “The Golden Targe.” Selected Poems, Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. London, Longman, 1996, lines 238–39, 243.

Fowler, Roger. “A Late Old English Handbook for the Use of a Confessor.” Anglia, 83. 1965, 29.

Fulk, R.D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2008, lines 1761–68, 59–60.

Gower, John. “Confessio Amantis.” The English Works of John Gower, vol 1 of 2. G.C. Macaulay, ed. Early English Text Society (EETS), O.S. 81. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900, lines 1172–78, 67. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Mack, Frances May. Seinte Marherete þe Meiden ant Martyr. Early English Text Society (EETS), O.S. 193. London: Oxford UP, 1934, 42. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. firen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2015, s.v. fire, n. and int., fire, v.1.

superspreader

3 October 2020

A superspreader is a person infected with a disease who is especially contagious, passing the infection on to an unusually large number of people. For many, the term may be a new one, but it has existed for nearly fifty years in public health jargon.

The first known use of superspreader is in the context of influenza and appears in the September 1973 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases:

Other possible studies would explore the effect of the closing of schools (duration and timing), interference by competing viruses, and variable rather than uniform infectiousness; one idea that would merit special attention is the occasional "superspreader": how frequently he occurs, how infectious he is, and how he is characterized (genetics, age, overt or silent infection, etc.)

As time went on, the meaning of the term expanded to encompass events at which a large number of are infected, termed superspreader events. This term’s first use appears in the context of the 2003 SARS outbreak. From the journal Science of 12 March 2004:

On the basis of epidemiological investigations, we divided the course of the epidemic into early, middle, and late phases. The early phase is defined as the period from the first emergence of SARS to the first documented superspreader event (SSE).

[...]

The first major SARS outbreak occurred in a hospital, HZS-2, in the city of Guangzhou, beginning on 31 January 2003 where an SSE was identified to be associated with more than 130 primary and secondary infections, of which 106 were hospital-acquired cases.

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Sources:

Chinese SARS Molecular Science Consortium. “Molecular Evolution of the SARS Coronavirus During the Course of the SARS Epidemic in China.” Science, 303.5664, 12 March 2004, 1666. JSTOR.

Fox, John P. and Edwin D. Kilbourne. “Epidemiology of Influenza: Summary of Influenza Workshop IV.” Journal of Infectious Diseases, 123.3, September 1973, 362. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2012, s.v. super-, prefix.

inshallah

20-second video clip of Biden using inshallah during the 29 September 2020 presidential debate

2 October 2020

During the 29 September 2020 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, with Chris Wallace of Fox News moderating, the following exchange occurred at 15 minutes, 45 seconds into the debate:

WALLACE:   Mr. President, I’m asking you a question. Will you tell us how much you paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017?

TRUMP:         Millions of dollars.

WALLACE:   You paid millions of dollars...

TRUMP:         Millions of dollars, yes.

WALLACE:   So not seven hundred and fifty?

TRUMP:         Millions of dollars, and you’ll get to see it. And you’ll get to see it.

BIDEN:           When? Inshallah?

Inshallah is Arabic for “if God wills it,” and it’s used throughout the Muslim world, not just among Arabic speakers, when expressing a wish or hope. Among believers it can be a prayer, but it can also be a superstitious statement warding off a jinx, akin to “cross my fingers” or “knock on wood.” And inshallah can also be used sarcastically, indicating that one does not believe the thing in question will happen. It does, however, seem odd coming from the mouth of an American presidential candidate. (The Biden campaign confirmed that the candidate did in fact use the word and it’s not a case of mumbling or mishearing.) But its use in the American speech and writing has been on the rise in recent decades, and Biden’s use of the phrase isn’t really all that unusual.

Inshallah has a long history of use in English, but mainly in the contexts of Muslim societies. Early uses are, unsurprisingly, dominated by glosses and quotations of Arabic speakers and Muslims. An early use by an Englishman is by Arthur Conolly who records this conversation with an Afghan that occurred on 25 October 1829:

"Artillery! What would you do with your artillery against us? Inshallah, we shall be invading Hindoostân some of these days, and then our Syuds shall make your powder turn to water, and our horse will gallop in upon you and cut you down at your guns."—"And if you do come," I replied, "Inshallah! we’ll make roast meat of you all!"—a retort which was received with the greatest good-humour by the whole company.

Of course, this is in conversation with a Muslim, and Conolly repeats the word after the Afghan had already used it.

A slightly more English-only use is in a letter by James Baillie Fraser of 11 August 1833, but again the context is of a Muslim country, in this case Iran:

Tehran, to be sure, is at this season as hot a hole as I ever was in; but I shall soon quit it, inshallah! for the healthy yeiláks of Lâr and the mountains.

And British diplomat John Bowring uses it when writing in his journal for 14 April 1855 about his mission to Siam, what is now Thailand. The fact that it is in his personal journal is telling; he is not writing for the benefit of someone else:

They urged the conclusion of the treaty, so that the Rattler might get away by the next tide; and from half-past five A.M. all hands have been engaged in copying out the articles. They wished to have them one after another, in the hope that the whole may be concluded to-day. Inshallah! Such promptitude was, I believe, never before exhibited in an Asiatic Court.

This instance is more unusual because Thailand is predominantly Buddhist, and Bowring’s diplomatic experience was primarily with China, not Arabic-speaking or Muslim nations. Still, he undoubtedly acquired it somewhere along the way and associated the term with the “East.”

But the earliest English-language use of inshallah that I’m aware of that is completely divorced from any connection with the Muslim world is from William Burroughs 1959 Naked Lunch:

Homosexuality is a political crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt rejection of its basic tenets. We aren’t a matriarchy here, Insh’allah.

But since the 2003–11 Iraq War, use of the phrase in American speech and writing has grown. American troops picked up and widely used the word. The following chart shows the number of times the word appears in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) in the thirty years from 1990–2019, divided into five-year increments.

Chart showing the rise in the use of inshallah in American speech and writing from 2004–14. Source: COCA.

Biden’s son Beau served in Iraq, and it seems likely that Biden picked up the phrase from his son.

So, in the end it is not all that unusual for Biden to have used the word. And he used it correctly, expressing the hope that Trump would release his tax returns, but also sarcastically, indicating that he doesn’t believe that will ever happen.

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Sources:

Bowring, John. The Kingdom and People of Siam, vol 2 of 2. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857, 304. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch (1959). New York: Grove Press, 1984, 36. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Conolly, Arthur. Journey to the North of India, vol. 2 of 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1834, 67. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), 2020. .

Fraser, James Baillie. A Winter’s Journey (Tâtar,) from Constantinople to Tehran, vol. 2 of 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1838, 416. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Liberman, Mark. “Inshallah.” Language Log, 1 October 2020.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. inshallah, int.

Video credit: C-SPAN, 2020.

cheesesteak

Cheesesteak from Pat’s King of Steaks in Philadelphia

29 September 2020

A cheesesteak is a type of sandwich consisting of thinly sliced or shaved beef, onions, and melted cheese (or Cheez Whiz if you don’t consider that product to fall into the category of “cheese”). The sandwich is closely associated with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and all evidence points to it having originated there.

The earliest reference to a cheesesteak that I have found is from the Philadelphia Daily News of 6 December 1963:

Fighter-manager Giardello is getting 15 percent of the gate. After expenses for training and buying out his previous manager, this will come to enough for a cheesesteak sandwich and carfare to his home near Garden State Park.

The designation Philadelphia is added about a decade later. From the Philadelphia Inquirer of 20 September 1974:

Start the day off at the 9th st. Italian market—the greatest dose of the Old World available in Modern America. My out-of-town guests usually rate it above the Liberty Bell as a tourist attraction. Stop off for lunch at Pat’s Steak at 6th and Catherine and let them sample a Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwich or a hoagie.

And that is clipped to Philly by 1981, when it appears in an advertisement in the Tampa Tribune on 8 January 1981:

We at Philly Mignon Restaurant want to tell you of the fine response we received from our ad-with-coupon for our Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich.

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Sources:

Advertisement. Tampa Tribune (Florida), 8 January 1981, 4-NS. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Curry, Bill. “Philadelphia Story: Ready for Change?” Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 September 1974, 1-C. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Merchant, Larry. “Who’s Worst Manager?” Philadelphia Daily News, 6 December 1963, 74. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, s.v. cheesesteak, n., Philly, n. and adj. March 2006; Philadelphia, n. December 2005. Note: the OED has a 1941 Chicago citation for Cheese steak that does not appear to be a reference to a sandwich and a 1946 citation for Cheese Steaks from a Brisbane, Australia newspaper, but this one appears in a recipe for a casserole and is unrelated to the sandwich.

Photo credit: Anonymous, 2006, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.