October surprise

27 October 2020

Political columnist and word maven William Safire defined an October surprise as a “last minute disruption before an election; unexpected political stunt, revelation, or diplomatic maneuver that could affect an election’s outcome.” The term is often applied, but not exclusively so, to such events that are orchestrated by one of the political campaigns.

During the 2016 presidential election, FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress on 28 October, less than two weeks before the election, announcing that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she had been Secretary of State. Comey’s action, which was contrary to Justice Department policy regarding such announcements that could influence an election, certainly qualified as an October surprise, although there is considerable debate as to whether or not it tipped the scales in favor of Donald Trump’s candidacy.

And with October 2020 nearly over, it doesn’t appear that there will be an October surprise this election cycle—although the bruhaha over Hunter Biden’s laptop, something that will surely be relegated to a footnote, at best, when the histories are written, was clearly a very inept attempt by the Trump campaign to generate one. But regardless of whether or not one appears, for forty years, the fear of an October surprise has hung over every presidential campaign.

The term October surprise dates to 1980, and was apparently coined by someone in Ronald Reagan’s campaign in reference to the campaign’s fear that just before the election President Jimmy Carter would announce the release of the fifty-two American hostages that were being held by Iran. The hostages had been taken on 4 November 1979, exactly one year prior to election day in 1980.

Syndicated political columnist Jack Anderson first reported on the phrase on 10 June 1980:

The biggest fear in Ronald Reagan’s inner circle right now is that Jimmy Carter will get an unexpected boost in the election campaign from an “October surprise.” Reagan’s advisers worry that a startling news development like last year’s “November surprise,” the Tehran hostage seizure, will rally support around a beleaguered president.

There’s not much the Republicans can do to forestall such an unpredictable blockbuster, so they’ll continue to hammer away at the gap between candidate Carter’s promises and President Carter’s achievements.

Meanwhile, Reagan is working on a “July surprise” of his own for unveiling at the Detroit convention. His choice of a running mate, insiders confide, will be someone who can broaden his appeal, rather than a political carbon copy who might please only a narrow base of ultraconservative true believers.

The July surprise turned out to be the naming of Reagan’s former rival for the Republican nomination, George H.W. Bush, as his running mate, just as Anderson reported. But July surprise didn’t become a catchphrase, presumably because July is too far away from a November election to be a surprise to voters.

But October surprise rapidly caught on and became a term of political art, and the term appears in numerous newspaper stories and columns starting in July. As reported by the Ithaca Journal, Reagan’s campaign was going on the record about it by 15 July 1980, although they were cagey about linking the surprise to the hostages, lest they be accused of “playing politics” with the international crisis:

Predicting an “October surprise” by President Carter, top campaign aides to Ronald Reagan said this morning they will establish an “intelligence operation” to monitor Carter’s political activities this fall.

[...]

As for the “October surprise,” neither Casey nor Meese would predict precisely what they had in mind. “it could be almost anything from a summit conference on energy to something happening in South America,” Casey said. “I don’t know if it will be wage and price controls or what.”

While July surprise did not turn out to have any legs, November surprise, however, did have a brief time in the spotlight in 1980. As October drew to a close and the prospect of release of the hostages that month dimmed, sights turned toward it happening in first few days of November. On 17 October 1980, the West Palm Beach Post quoted third-party candidate John Anderson using it, although he was referring to his hopes for surprise victory on election day:

John Anderson said yesterday he is in the race for president until the last polling place is closed, and that President Carter will get a “November surprise” on election day.

This use contrasts with the use of October surprise on the same page of the paper, this time referring to a political endorsement that Reagan received:

Reagan got what his aides call the campaign’s “October surprise” yesterday when Ralph David Abernathy, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and his colleague Hosea Williams endorsed the Republican nominee.

Such an endorsement would hardly be a surprise today, but in 1980 evangelical support for the Republican party was not a given, and Carter, an evangelical Christian himself, was widely thought to have significant support from that quarter.

But with November looming, the surprise once again turned to the release of the hostages. An editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on 24 October 1980 read:

[Carter] has a positive obligation to be alert to any Iranian initiative that might lead to the release of the 52 Americans—and respond to it.

But to the extent possible, he should do his best to prevent any such solution from taking on the appearance of a “November surprise,” not only in the posture he takes in any private negotiations but also in his comments about Iran on the campaign trail, which ought to be muted.

And on 31 October 1980 the Boston Globe reported that Carter campaign officials had all but given up hope that the hostages would be released before the election:

A spokesman for Carter’s national campaign said privately yesterday that even though it would be a big boost for the President, “in my heart, I don’t think the hostages are coming out in time for the election.” Another Carter campaign operative in Washington said privately: “Reagan’s people were talking about an October surprise. I wish we could give them the hostages as a November surprise, but I doubt it.”

Carter’s State Department, however, would continue to work for the hostages’ release, and that happened on 20 January 1981, Reagan’s inauguration day.

After the 1980 election, November surprise faded from memory—just as July was too early for a surprise, November was too late—while talk of an October surprise continued to crop up every four years.

Yet to be seen is whether or not the concept of an October surprise will continue as early voting and vote-by-mail becomes the standard methods of holding an election and the prospect of an event catching a significant number of voters by surprise in the closing days of a campaign becomes less likely.

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Sources:

Anderson, Jack. “2 Big Fish Escape ABSCAM Net” (syndicated). Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), 10 June 1980, 2C. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“GOP Expects ‘Surprise.’” Ithaca Journal (New York), 15 July 1980, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“The Hostage Temptation” (editorial). Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 24 October 1980, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Nyhan, David. “Carter’s Pennsylvania Foes Fear an Election-Day Surprise.” Boston Globe, 31 October 1980, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, s.v. October, n.

Post Wire Services. “Anderson: ‘I Have a Chance.” The Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), 17 October 1980, A2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Reagan Gets Key Support.” The Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), 17 October 1980, A2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Safire, William. Safire’s Political Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008, 487.

ghoul

Image of a woman discovering a ghoul feeding on a corpse from an 1840 edition of the Arabian Nights

26 October 2020

The word ghoul comes to English from the Arabic ghul, and its definition in both languages is pretty much the same, an evil spirit or creature that robs graves and feeds on corpses. The Arabic noun comes from a verb meaning to seize.

(I haven’t watched the TV series Witcher or read the books on which it is based, but recently while watching a teen play a video game based on those stories, I became aware that in those stories there is a creature called an alghoul that is distinct from a ghoul, or technically it is a ghoul that has been feeding on corpses for so long that it craves fresh meat and so kills its victims itself. But in Arabic the al is simply the definite article, so al-ghul is just the ghoul.)

Ghoul enters English with the first translation of the Tales of the Arabian Nights in 1721. This translation is not directly from the Arabic, but from the French one by Antoine Galland, which was published in 1704–17 and was the first European translation of the collection of stories. From this 1721 English translation:

I ran presently down to the Door, which she left half open, and follow’d her by Moon-Light, till she went into a Burying-Ground, just by our House. I got to the End of the Wall, taking Care not to be seen, and look’d over, and saw Amina with a Goule.

Your Majesty knows that Goules of both Sexes are wandring Dæmons, which generally infest old Building, from whence they rush, but by Surprize, on People that pass by, kill them, and eat their Flesh; and for want of Prey, will sometimes go in to the Night, into Burying-Grounds, and feed on the dead Bodies that have been buried there.

And as with many such words for evil spirits, ghoul developed a figurative sense as well. Here is an early example from Washington Irving’s 1824 Tales of a Traveller:

Wolfgang arrived at Paris at the breaking out of the revolution. The popular delirium at first caught his enthusiastic mind, and he was captivated by the political and philosophical theories of the day: but the scenes of blood which followed shocked his sensitive nature; disgusted him with society and the world, and made him more than ever a recluse. He shut himself up in a solitary apartment in the Pays Latin, the quarter of students. There in a gloomy street not far from the monastic walls of the Sorbonne, he pursued his favourite speculations. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary goul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

While this type of literary ghoul is more pathetic than frightening, Irving, of course, is well known in the horror genre for his Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a perennial Halloween favorite.

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Sources:

Irving, Washington (as Geoffrey Crayon). Tales of a Traveller, vol. 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1824, 72–73. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

“The Story of Sidi Nonman.” The Arabian Nights Entertainments, vol. 10 of 10. London: W. Waylor, 1721, 123. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: "Amine Discovered with the Goule," illustration for "History of Sidi Nouman" in The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Edward Forster, trans., G. Moir Bussey, ed. London: Joseph Thomas, 1840, 398–99. Google Books.

paddy wagon

A Portland, Oregon police paddy wagon from 1912

23 October 2020

A paddy wagon is a police van used to transport criminals. The name is commonly thought to come from an association with the Irish, because in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a disproportionately large number of Irish were police in North American cities. This supposition is only partly true. The paddy is indeed a reference to the Irish, but it comes from an unexpected direction.

The first paddy wagons were wheelbarrows, especially small or shoddily made ones. The earliest association of paddy with wheelbarrows comes, surprisingly enough, from Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his 1850 collection of lectures Representative Men, Emerson writes:

But great men: the word is injurious. Is there caste? is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature. “Generous and handsome, he says, “is your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies.” Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, and self-devotion, and they make war and death sacred;—but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill?—The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.

Exactly what did Emerson mean by his “country is his wheelbarrow”? We can’t be sure, but he was writing at the end of the Great Famine (a.k.a. the Irish Potato Famine), and he could have been referring to the Irish diaspora, with Irish people emigrating abroad with all their possessions in a wheelbarrow. Or he could be referring to a poor Irish farmer, who depends upon his wheelbarrow for his livelihood. In any case, in the years following Emerson’s lecture, we see a spate of references to wheelbarrows being called paddy wagons. Emerson may have created the association of the Irish and wheelbarrows, or perhaps he was just echoing one that was already in circulation. And while Emerson was clearly not using the allusion as a slur against the Irish, others that follow clearly would.

On 9 November 1868, the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel ran this article about a political rally that featured wheelbarrows:

WHEELBARROW
We found the barrow a marvel of the carriage-makers’ art. It was finished in the highest manner. The trunk of a mighty oak had been cleft to provide material for the body of the carriage. As it stood exposed to the admiring gaze of those assembled, one little thought its symmetrical proportions deserved the vulgar epithet of “paddy wagon” of a by-standing Democrat of the old school.

The next year, on 6 December 1869, the same paper runs another story that clearly associates a paddy wagon with the Irish or “Fenianers”:

James Jones and John Wood were each fined ten dollars and costs, for drunkeness. In anticipation of a call for an explanation as to the individuality of the said Jones and Wood, we will state that they are not persons of “long standing” in the community, having just come across the Herring-pond in a Dutch shallop on wheels. The assertion that the boat was a paddy-wagon, and its occupants Fenianers, is groundless, and contradicted in the fact that the parties signed their names Yahmes Yohnes and Hannes Holtz.

And on 12 July 1876, the Milwaukee paper again uses paddy wagon to refer to a wheelbarrow:

William Brotherhood mourns the loss of a one-wheeled carriage of the pattern known as “paddy wagon.” The bow-wheeler was stolen from his new building on Sixth street, near Spring.

Moving west, there is this delightful story in the 1 November 1895 issue of the Idaho Avalanche:

Seventeen years ago, in 1878, Lyman Potter, of New York state, performed the prodigious task of pushing a common “paddy” wheelbarrow across the continent. He started from his home on Dane street, Albany, N.Y., on the morning of April 10, 1878, and arrived in San Francisco on the afternoon of October 5 of the same year, being almost exactly one hundred and seventy-eight days (five hours and three minutes over), in performing the wearisome feat. Potter was a shoemaker, and the trip was the result of a wager made by some friends who believed that such a trip would occupy at least two hundred days. The wager was one thousand dollars, but Potter made between three and five times that sum advertising for different parties along the route. The wheelbarrow was made specially for the use to which it was put and weighed but seventy-five pounds. The distance traveled by Potter was exactly four thousand eighty-five and three-quarter miles.

A paddy wagon is featured again in this Houston Daily Post article from 9 November 1896 that combines a bet with an electoral politics (I have no idea what the Sioux in the sub-headline is supposed to refer to):

ELECTION BETS
Sioux in a Paddy Wagon

Hempstead, Texas, November 7.—The town people at 10 o’clock this morning were treated to an extraordinary free show, the outcome of an election bet. Mr. Ed Jones, an ardent Bryan man, was pushing around the square a wheelbarrow, wherein was located Mr. Deran, the venerable war correspondent of the Galveston News, who had backed up in his judgment the cause of William McKinley. According to the terms of the bet, Mr. Jones not only had to push the wheelbarrow, with a clown cap on his head, but had to continually yell “Hurrah for McKinley!” This, coupled with the fact that about 100 yelling kids followed the procession, made the affair laughable indeed.

The farming journal Poultry West of November 1898 had this advice:

First take everything moveable in hour hen house, then, if the floor is of dirt, get your neighbor’s wheelborrow [sic]; Paddy’s wagon, as a friend of mine always names it, and into it shovel a load of the filthy soil from the hen house floor and wheel it away.

And paddy wheelbarrows were also useful in beekeeping, as evidenced by this from Gleanings in Bee Culture of December 1903:

Try the experiment some time with a small paddy wheelbarrow, with a small wheel, and then with a modern wheelbarrow with a large wheel. I think you will find the push or pull, or, technically speaking, the "draw-bar pull," would be much greater in the first case mentioned than in the last; so that what you actually save in weight would be more than counter-balanced in the extra strength exerted to push the small wheel over obstructions.

This description from a 1904 catalog obliquely refers to paddy wagon without explaining what is meant, but it seems likely that it refers to a wheelbarrow:

The 1904 catalog of the Electric Wheel Co., of Quincy, Illinois, is a handsome and profusely illustrated pamphlet of 50 pages showing almost every variety of wheels for almost every conceivable purpose from light steel wheels for the farm, “paddy wagon,” to heavy, wide trucks for moving the “monarchs of the forest.”

And finally, another election bet involving a wheelbarrow, this time from St. Johns, Oregon on 19 May 1908:

P.J. Peterson and J.S. Downey no [sic] wishing to gamble on the election entered into an agreement that if Word was elected Peterson should give Dawney [sic] a ride in a one-wheeled automobile from Prall’s corner to the post office and return, while if Stevens wins the race Downey is to treat Peterson to a similar ride. There is a Paddy-wagon ride coming in any event.

Meanwhile, municipal services in North American cities were using patrol wagons. These could be for fire departments, as evidenced by this 29 November 1859 article in the New York Herald:

In going to the fire engine No. 38[?] went down Thames street, and becoming unmanageable, ran into the Fire Insurance patrol wagon, whereby James E. Morgan, one of the insurance patrolmen, was knocked down, his right arm was broken, and his face and head badly cut and bruised.

Or they could be for police departments, as this 14 January 1881 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune shows:

The new police patrol wagon for the West Lake street district was exhibited at the City Hall yesterday. It is a strongly-built vehicle, somewhat similar to that used by the fire patrol. It has a gong, steps in the rear, and a large brass rail on each side. It is provided with lamps, lanterns, stretchers, etc., and is a complete and ready police out[fit?]. Superintendent McGarigie[?] is well pleased with it.

And the 1895 financial report for the city of Augusta, Georgia refers to expenses for the maintenance of police department pat. wagons:

Lowrey Wagon Works, stretcher for pat. wagon and repairs............ 28  50

This is obviously a reference to patrol wagon. But this clipping seems to be for brevity in a long list of expenses, and it there are no other uses of pat wagon to be found.

Finally, in the opening years of the twentieth century these separate threads come together. The association of Irish wheelbarrow blends with the patrol wagon driven by Irish-American police officers, and the latter becomes the paddy wagon. It seems likely that patrol wagon gave way to paddy wagon first in jocular speech, referring to the Irish police officers driving it.

From the Menasha Record of Wisconsin of 4 October 1906:

Adrian Clark a resident of Kaukauna at [indistinct] to commit suicide at Appleton yesterday. He doffed his wearing apparel and stutteringly announced his intention to a local bridgetender when the patrol arrived and he was taken in the “paddy wagon” to the police station where he regained his senses.

We get this bit of dialogue from the Chicago Daily Tribune of 12 September 1909:

They had fire sale over to Meals & Keerey’s the other day, and for two bits I got all the good poetry ever writ from Homer to George M Cohan. I think Homer’s swell, don’t you? Gee, where he gets off that spiel about “Now clashed the chariots to the fray”—don’t it make you think of the paddy wagon going down the street to pinch a gambling joint?

And paddy wagon for a police van would quickly become a fixture in English slang.

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Sources:

“Catalogs Received.” Michigan Farmer, 27 February 1904, 201. ProQuest Magazines.

“City Hall.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 January 1881, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“City Matters.” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel (Wisconsin), 6 December 1869, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Election Bets.” Houston Daily Post (Texas), 9 November 1896, 4. Newspapers.com.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Uses of Great Men.” Representative Men. Seven Lectures. London: George Routledge, 1850, 34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Fire in Trinity Place—Two Firemen Badly Injured.” New York Herald, 29 November 1859, 5. ProQuest Civil War Era.

“For Cold Weather.” The Poultry West, November 1898, 16. Newspapers.com.

“General Correspondence.” Gleanings in Bee Culture, 31.23, 1 December 1903, 1012. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

“In the Twin Cities.” Menasha Record (Menasha, Wisconsin), 4 October 1906, 1. Newspapers.com.

Liberman, Anatoly, with comments by Stephen Goranson. “Monthly Etymology Gleanings for March 2015, Part 2.” OUPblog, 8 April 2015.

“Local Miscellany.” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel (Wisconsin), 12 July 1876, 8. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Long Trip in a Wheelbarrow.” Idaho Avalanche (Silver City, Idaho), 1 November 1895, 4. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Official Reports, City of Augusta, Ga. 1895” (6 January 1896). The Mayor’s Message, Department Reports, and Accompanying Documents for the Year 1895. Augusta, Georgia: John M. Weigle, 1896, 29. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. paddy, n.2.

St. Johns Review (Oregon), 29 May 1908, 3. Newspapers.com

“South Side Wheeling Tour.” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel (Wisconsin), 9 November 1868, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Stockyards Freddie. “‘Beautiful Day in the Country’ Empty Phrase Without the Jug.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 September 1909, E3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo Credit: unknown photographer, 1912, City of Portland, Oregon Archives.

glitch

22 October 2020

Sometimes the meaning of a technical term becomes more general when it moves into common discourse, but sometimes a general term acquires a more specialized meaning in the mouths of engineers and scientists. The latter is the case with glitch.

In English, glitch has the general meaning of a snag or malfunction of some sort. It is borrowed into English from either or both the German glitschen or the Yiddish glitshen, meaning to slip or slide. The earliest example I can find of the word in English is a 19 May 1940 syndicated newspaper column by Katherine Brush:

When the radio talkers make a little mistake in diction they call it a “fluff,” and when they make a bad one they call it a “glitch,” and I love it.

Brush is talking about mispronunciations and slips of the tongue, but the context is that of radio.

The radio context is important because the term develops a specialized electrical engineering sense. This sense is described by astronaut John Glenn in his 1962 book Into Orbit:

Another term we adopted to describe some of our problems was “glitch.” Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical circuit which takes place when the circuit suddenly has a new load put on it.

It’s possible that the specialized sense was earlier, and the radio announcers acquired the word from the engineers, but the evidence points in the other direction.

In any case, despite becoming familiar to the general public through the space program of the 1960s, use of glitch remained rare in general discourse until the 1980s, when the rise of personal computing and other home electronics made technical glitches a more common occurrence.

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Sources:

Brush, Katherine. “Out of My Mind” (syndicated). Miami Herald, 19 May 1940, G2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.

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

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

googol / Google

21 October 2020

Rarely do we know the exact circumstances surrounding the coining of a new word. But in the case of googol, a mathematical term for the number represented by a one followed by 100 zeroes or 10¹⁰⁰, we know exactly who coined it and when. It was coined by Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner introduced his nephew’s coinage to the world in a 1938 article in the journal Scripta Mathematica:

You may want to know where I got the name "googol." I was walking in the woods with my nephew one day, and I asked the boy to think up any name for the number, any amusing name that entered his head. He suggested "googol." At the same time, he gave me a name for a still larger number: "googolplex." A googolplex is much larger than a googol, but it is still finite. Put down one, and then follow it by zeros until you get tired. No, that is a joke, because the googolplex is a specific number. A googolplex is one with so many zeros that the number of zeros is a googol: one with a googol of zeros. A googolplex is certainly bigger than a googol

To give a sense of the scale of the number, the total number of baryons (protons, neutrons, and electrons) in the universe is considerably less than a googol, approximately 3.28 × 10⁸⁰.

The name of the Google search engine is an allusion to the huge number, implying that the engine handles a googol’s worth of data. The search engine was launched in 1998. The spelling was undoubtedly changed to make it a valid trademark.

The verb to Google appears shortly after the search engine’s launch. Google’s co-founder Larry Page posted the following to an e-mail list on 8 July 1998:

Have fun and keep googling!

The fact that it was Page who used the verb is a bit ironic, given that trademarks are supposed to be used only as adjectives (e.g., the Google search engine) and continued use of the term as a verb can lead to eventual loss of trademark protection, although I suppose Google has the money to fight this to the bitter end in court and this is not likely to be the fate of this particular trademark.

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Sources:

Bennett, Jay. “How Many Particles Are in the Observable Universe?” Popular Mechanics, 11 July 2017.

Kasner, Edward. “New Names in Mathematics.” Scripta Mathematica, 5.1, January 1938, 13, HathiTrust Digital Library.

Kasner, Edward and James Newman. Mathematics and the Imagination. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940, 23. HathiTrust Digital Library.

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

———, third edition, March 2006, s.v. Google, v.2.