nail-biter

4 November 2020

A nail-biter can be one of two things, a person who bites their nails or a suspenseful situation or close-run contest, such as a sporting event or a close election. Nail biting has long been recognized as characteristic of nervousness. The earliest English-language mention that I know of is by Francis de Lisle (pseudonym of Louis Régnier de La Planche) wrote about it in a book that was translated into English in 1577:

The thing which most spited the Duke of Guise, was in that he perceiued himselfe bridled by the yelding of New hauen to the Englishmen, which vnto them was graunted vpon sundry not very vnequal conditions, considering the time: & this caused the Cardinal and the rest of his brethren to bite their nailes, seeing newe worke now cut out for them in an other place.

The term nail-biter itself, in its literal sense of a person who habitually engages in the practice dates to at least 1857 when it appears in the pages of the medical journal the Medical Independent:

Few sights are more disgusting than the fingers of a nail-biter of long standing. Nor is its unsightliness the only bad consequence resulting from this nasty habit; the ends of the fingers are kept in a state of constant inflammation, they are tender and unfit for strong grasping of any substance, and the sense of touch is seriously impaired, so as considerably to interfere with manipulations which require the exercise of any delicacy of that sense.

Because it is a nervous habit, some people tend to bite their nails faced with a suspenseful situation. We can see the transition from the literal sense to the figurative one in this passage from the Washington, D. C. Evening Star of 11 October 1939, about a nervous football coach who tends to bite his nails during close games:

The picture of the modern coach as a cold-blooded big businessman, calculating as a pawnbroker, bears no resemblance to the big marine. Larson at a football game is a whirling dervish with the itch. He’s the champion heavyweight nail biter of the East Coast. He takes his football hard. He’s as unorthodox as a fan dancer in red-flannel underwear.

And just three years later we see nail-biter being used to describe a suspenseful radio program. From the Portland Oregonian of 4 December 1942:

When it comes to mystery thrillers, Roberta and Pat, two KGW script writers, pick the CBS “Suspense” show as a real nail-biter. The only trouble is Suspense is interred at 6:30 Tuesdays under Fibber McGee, where few will ever hear it.

While nail biting as a practice dates into antiquity, the term nail-biter is a relatively recent development.

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Sources:

A. R. T. “ARTICLE II.—Chapters from an Unpublished Work on Hygiene.” The Medical Independent, 2.6, February 1857, 319. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Grover, John S. (Associated Press). “From Football Traffic Cop to Navy Coach is Larson’s Jump.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 11 October 1939, A-18. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lisle, Francis de (Louis Régnier de La Planche. A Legendarie. London: 1577, sig. I 8v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Moyes, William. “Behind the Mike.” The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), 4 December 1942, 13. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2003, nail-biter, n., nail, n.

globalization

4 November 2020

Globalization is one of the hot-button political issues of recent times, but the word, if not the concept it represents, dates back almost a hundred years.

Globalisation appears in French in 1929, a coinage of Belgian psychologist Jean-Ovide Decroly in his La Fonction de Globalisation et l’Enseignement to refer to a stage in a child’s development. The word appears in English by the following year in William Boyd’s Towards a New Education:

The Decroly method of teaching reading has some resemblance to old methods, especially to that of Jacotot. But the psychological bases have been systematically elaborated. They are to be found in what Decroly calls the function of globalization, a function that has been psychologically investigated under different names in different countries, e.g. wholeness in American and Gestalt, in Germany.

The verb to globalize enters political jargon a few years later, as recorded by Samuel Bemis in his 1936 Diplomatic History of the United States. But here it refers to the expansion of diplomacy from bilateral to multilateral forums and agreements:

In the Peace Conference at Paris Woodrow Wilson wrote into the Covenant of the League of Nations the principles of his proposed Pan-American pact, notably Article X, to him the most vital article of the Covenant. He believed that by this article he was globalizing the Monroe Doctrine, whereas previously he would have merely pan-Americanized it.

By the 1940s, globalization was being used to refer to the spread of cultural ideas and perceptions. Here is an example from the 15 January 1944 Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper that despite its name had a nationwide circulation and readership, on how the U.S. military was globalizing Jim Crow:

But Jim Crow is G.I. equipment and goe[s] wherever the American solider goes—all over the world. You need no details. Just take it from any one of us: this time we are making the world safe for Democracy—American style.

Bad enough in itself, this fact has deeper meaning. The American Negro and his problems are taking on a global significance. The world has begun to measure America by what she does to us. But—and this is the point—we stand in danger (and we are only standing, if not supinely sitting!) of losing the otherwise beneficial aspects of globalization of our problems by allowing the “Bilbos in uniform” with and without brass hats to spread their version of us everywhere.

The term enters the world of economics with the formation of the European Economic Community in 1958. From the Winter 1959 issue of the journal International Organization:

On January 1, 1959, under the EEC treaty, the six community countries would take the following first practical steps toward their common market goal: 1) a 10 percent over-all mutual reduction in tariffs; 2) and over-all mutual increase of 20 percent in existing quotas; 3) the establishment of minimum quotas at 3 percent of national production for each product; and 4) the globalization of quotas.

And within two years worries about how globalization threatened domestic jobs appeared. From the Detroit Free Press of 27 February 1961:

The UAW has been worried about rumors of the foreign-made compact because it fears loss of more American jobs.

Carl Stellato, president of UAW Local 600, said in July, 1960, he had information that Ford was to build at least the transmission, rear-end and engine for the four-cylinder vehicle in Europe.

The union expressed displeasure that Ford was considering a European-built car while UAW members at the Ford Rouge plants were laid off.

Late in 1960, Ford negotiated the purchase of all outstanding stock in the Ford Motor Co. of England in a move toward “globalization.”

Sometimes the hot-button issues have been simmering for a long time.

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Sources:

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. A Diplomatic History of the United States. New York: Henry Holt, 1936, 754. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Boyd, William, ed. Towards a New Education. New York: Knopf, 1930, 159. HathiTrust Digital Library.

“European Communities.” International Organization, 13.1, Winter 1959, 176. JSTOR.

Harper, Lucius C. “Dustin’ Off the News.” Chicago Defender, 15 January 1944, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. globalization, n., globalize, v.

“Tiny Ford Reported Near.” Detroit Free Press, 27 February 1961, 1–2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

swing state

Fivethirtyeight.com graphic showing voting behavior in four swing states, 2000–2020; 2020 projection based on 25 August data

3 November 2020

In U.S. politics, a swing state is one that either political party has a reasonable chance of winning. The metaphor is, obviously, that of oscillating back and forth. The term swing state dates to the mid twentieth century, but the use of the verb to swing in political contexts is much older.

Use of the verb this way dates to at least 1900, and I’m sure it can be antedated into the nineteenth century. It appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer in its 21 October 1900 reporting of a New York Herald poll of the presidential election that year:

Nebraska . . . . . . Democratic . . . . . 8,000
Idaho . . . . . . . . . Democratic . . . . . 8,000
Montana. . . . . . . Democratic . . . . . 8,000
Utah—Mormons can swing State either way.

Swing state itself appears in the pages of the Dallas Morning News of 16 August 1948. The columnist, Lynn Landrum, errs in predicting a Thomas Dewey victory in that year’s election (to be fair, as pretty much everyone knows, she wasn’t the only one), but she was right in that had Texas gone for Dewey the outcome of the election would not have changed and Truman would still have been re-elected, and she was correct in predicting what happens to states that reliably vote for one party—they are often ignored by the political process:

The likelihood now is that Tom Dewey will be the next President, no matter how Texas votes. The only thing that Texans might change by their votes is the amount of weight Texas will be given in future party convention plans.

Once Texas is known to be a “swing” state, no major political party will ever again ignore Texas.

Texas would become competitive in the next election cycle, with Eisenhower wining it in 1952. And it would remain competitive until 2000, by which time it had become solidly Republican. Although it once again is showing signs of becoming a swing state.

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Sources:

Landrum, Lynn. “Thinking Out Loud.” Dallas Morning News, 16 August 1948, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. swing-, comb. form.

“Result of the Herald’s Poll in ‘Doubtful States.’” Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 October 1900, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Fivethirtyeight.com, 1 September 2020.

college / electoral college

Map of the United States showing state sizes in proportion to their electoral college voting power as of the 2010 census

2 November 2020

In the United States, at least, the term college is usually synonymous with university, an institution of higher education. But we also have the electoral college, an arcane body that actually chooses the president and vice president. It seems odd to apply the same word to both.

College comes from the Old French collége, which in turn is from the Latin collegium, meaning society, brotherhood, guild. One of the word’s early appearances is in a Wycliffite tract from c. 1380 that uses college to refer both to Christ and his apostles and to contemporary religious orders:

And siþ criste and his colage myȝt not be dispensid wiþ ne be exempte fro þe bondis of þe olde lawe in þis mater, I merueyle where þe pryuelegis commen alonde wherby owre colagis of monkis, chanons or eny oþer endowid prestis þat dwellen in siche conventycles claymen to be exempt fro þis bonde of þe olde lawe in this poynte.

(And since Christ and his college might not be dispensed with nor be exempt from the bonds of the old law in this matter, I marvel where the privileges common in this country whereby our colleges of monks, canons or any other endowed priests that dwell in such gatherings claim to be exempt from this bond of the old law on this point.)

And at roughly the same time, the word is used in reference to a university, only in Latin, not English. From the royal patent of New College, Oxford, 30 June 1379 (“new” is a relative term here):

prædictus Episcopus aut Custos et scholares collegii, domus sive aulæ, prædicti sic fundandi,

(the aforementioned bishop or custodian and scholars of the college, house or hall, of the aforementioned thus founded)

Use of college in reference to a university reference is because students and scholars originally lived and ate together, akin to cloistered monks and nuns. And by c. 1387 the word is being used in English to refer to an institution at a university. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale:

Greet sokene hath this millere, out of doute,
With whete and malt of al the land aboute;
And nameliche ther was a greet collegge
Men clepen the Soler Halle at Cantebregge;
Ther was hir whete and eek hir malt ygrounde.

(Surely, this miller has a great monopoly,
With wheat and malt from all the land about;
And in particular there was a great college
That men call the Soler Hall at Canterbury
There their wheat and also their malt was ground.)

By the mid sixteenth century, college is being applied in political contexts. Thomas Eliot refers to the Roman Senate as a college in his 1541 Image of Governance:

And these counsaylors for their age shulde be called Senatours, (for Senes in latyne are olde men) not withstandynge beinge saluted or spoken to, they shulde be named fathers. Also the college or company of theym was incorporate by the name of the senate. Moreouer of this colledge, shulde be elected the great Iudges and offycers in the weale publyke, to whome shulde be committed the determination of Iustyce, the execution of ceremonies and solemne sacrifices, and other authorities, whiche do belong vnto gouernance.

And the term electoral college appears by the mid seventeenth century. This is, obviously, not a reference to the United States, which had yet to exist, but rather to the group of electors who chose the Holy Roman Empire. From a May 1658 letter to Robert Boyle:

The electoral college hath written to the king of Sweden, promising not to proceed to the imperial election, till the Austrians and Poland have first made their peace with him.

The U.S. electoral college was established by the 1787 constitution, but the term does not appear in that document, nor does it appear in the Federalist Papers. The earliest such use of the term I can find is from a 25 August 1800 letter by Representative John Fowler to his constituents in Kentucky, but Fowler is not referring to the U.S. electoral college as we know it, but rather to a super-electoral college that had been proposed to oversee the conduct of the presidential election:

And to shew the length to which the party were disposed to go on, attempt was made to introduce a regulation paramount to the constitution, to create a conservative senate, or electoral college of thirteen members, six from each house and the chief justice to preside, who were to be authorized to investigate the election of the several states for President and Vice-President; and to determine in secret conclave, the legality of the votes, and finally to declare who shall be the next President of the United States. This measure so repugnant to every principle of the constitution, was fortunately defeated.

The earliest use of electoral college to refer to the electors of the U.S. president that I have found is from a month later, in the pages of the Washington Federalist of 30 September 1800:

The object is to elect a President—not to employ this or that instrument to elect him: to vote for a President, not to transmit the vote by this or that man to the electoral college. This object is effected by united the vote of the state. Whether the people shall vote for the President by electors chosen by their representatives in the legislature, or by persons deputed by themselves to the electoral college, the vote will be the same. In either case the vote of the state will be united, and will be given in the same person. The same object therefore is attained by either mode.

Of course, nowhere in this discussion is the idea that people should directly elect the president without the mediation of state legislatures or electoral colleges.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Reeve’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, 1.3987–91. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer’s Website.

“The Clergy May Not Hold Property.” The English Works of John Wyclif. F.D. Matthew, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 74. London: Trübner and Co., 1880, 366. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Eliot, Thomas. The Image of Governance. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1541, 62r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Fowler, John. “Extracts from a Letter of John Fowler, Member of Congress from the State of Kentucky, to his Consitutients.” Impartial Observer (Providence, Rhode Island), 25 August 1800, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Hart, Samuel. “Letter to Robert Boyle” (May 1658). The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, vol. 6 of 6. London: W. Johnston, et al., 1772, 107. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

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

“New College, Oxford: Royal Patent of Foundation” (30 June 1379). Statutes of the Colleges of Oxford, vol. 1. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1853, 268. Google Books.

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

“To the People of Maryland.” Washington Federalist (Georgetown, District of Columbia), 30 September 1800, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Wes Colley, 2011, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

red state / blue state / purple state

Journalists Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw broadcasting on Election Day 2000 (or more likely in the wee hours of the next day) in front of a map of red and blue U.S. states

2 November 2020

In current American political parlance red represents the Republican Party, blue the Democratic Party, and purple something in between. But it wasn’t always this way. Before the 2000 presidential election, the colors switched back and forth, and the colors weren’t inherently associated with a particular party.

The choice of colors is arbitrary and comes from the electoral maps that television news programs show on their election night coverage. Before 2000, the practice was to represent the incumbent party in blue and the challenger in red. So in the 1992 election, when Democrat Bill Clinton was running against the incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush, the states that went Democratic were shown in red, as can be seen in this Boston Globe article of 15 October 1992 previewing the election night coverage:

But when the anchormen turn to their electronic tote boards election night and the red states for Clinton start swamping the blue states for Bush, this will be a strange night for me.

And in their 2000 election coverage, the networks used the same criterion. Since Democrats held the White House, states that went for Al Gore were blue states, while states that went for the Republican challenger George W. Bush were colored red. Again, from a preview of the coverage on CBS News, this time many months ahead, on 8 May 2000, we see Democratic states designated as blue states:

BRYANT GUMBEL: Let's take a look at the fancy map that you've had us make up. And you—you explain it if you would—the state-by-state support.

CRAIG CRAWFORD: It—it's not as complicated as it might seem. What we have are, you know, Bush and Gore, their core states here. And then the tossup states. You see Bush in—in red and you see the blue states are—are for Gore.

And this from NBC’s Today on 30 October 2000, just prior to the election, uses both blue state and red state:

MATT LAUER: The red states we have here, you have going for Al—I mean for George Bush, the blue states for Al Gore. What does the count look like so far?

TIM RUSSERT: Well, Matt, first the viewer will see a lot more red than blue and they'll say 'Uh-oh, is this race over?' Far from it. The electoral college is based on population. So if you win a lot of states, but they have small numbers of people, it means less than if you win California, Illinois, and the big states that Gore is winning.

As Matt Lauer’s hastily corrected error shows, the fact that the colors were not consistently associated with particular parties from election to election meant that at first glance one might be confused about which party was leading. Even an experienced journalist could be momentarily confused.

But the 2000 election was so close, the election coverage continuing for weeks after Election Day, and the political climate so polarizing, that the terms red state and blue state became locked in as representing the Republicans and Democrats, respectively. And the colors became not only representative of which party a state typically votes for, but became representative of that state’s cultural ethos, as well. From NBC News coverage of George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on 27 February 2001, following the election. Pennsylvania had voted for Gore in the election:

TOM BROKAW: The country is weary of ideological wars. That was the message of this past election, and both the congressional leaders now and the president of the United States are responding to that.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: A red state president reaching out to…

TIM RUSSERT: Also note, Brian, that the tax family was also from Pennsylvania.

WILLIAMS: That's right.

RUSSERT: It's a swing state.

WILLIAMS: It's a red state president reaching out to a blue state tonight…

And the red state/blue state started to be used outside of political contexts. From a Time magazine obituary for NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt of 5 March 2001:

Dale Earnhardt left school in the ninth grade and entered his first race, legend has it, for grocery money. At the time of his death, his income had reached nearly $27 million a year. Mostly the money came from sales of merchandise: hats, jackets and the No. 3 logo sticker on the back of my family car that occasionally earns me a knowing honk and a wave from a like-minded fan, even during my blue-state commute to New York City.

Of course, not every state votes reliably for either the Democrats or the Republicans, and such swing states came to be designated as purple, a blend of blue and red. From a CNN show of 20 May 2002:

With an exploding and changing population, younger and more diverse by the year, Florida is reliably nothing. In the 2000 election year of red states or blue, Florida was purple. It is up for grabs, in play, a toss-up state, ergo a high traffic area for politicians.

Of course, the color designations are gross over-simplifications. No state is entirely red or blue in its political leanings. For example, Salt Lake City in deeply red Utah reliably votes Democratic, and counties in upstate New York, a state that is deeply blue overall, reliably vote Republican. The more accurate division would be blue urban areas, red exurban and rural areas, and purple suburban areas. Whether a state is blue, red, or purple largely depends on the relative populations living in these three areas.

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Sources:

“The Early Show.” CBS News Transcripts, 8 May 2000. Nexis Uni.

Glowka, Wayne, et al. “Among the New Words.” American Speech, 80.2, Summer 2005, 207–15.

Nyhan, David. “Ending Up in the Clinton Column.” Boston Globe (City Edition), 15 October 1992, 19. ProQuest.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. red state, n. and adj.; June 2009, s.v. blue state, n. and adj.; September 2007, purple, adj. and n.

Snow, Kate, et al. “Miami; Bush Denounces Castro; Cuban-Americans Applaud Bush's Decision; Cuban Dissidents Criticize.” CNN, 20 May 2002. Nexis Uni.

Sullivan, Robert, et al. “The Last Lap.” Time, 157.9, 5 March 2001, 67. EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate.

“Today.” NBC News Transcripts, 30 October 2000. Nexis Uni.

Williams, Brian, et al. “President Bush Takes His Policy Agenda Before Congress. MSNBC Show: The News with Brian Williams, 27 February 2001, Nexis Uni.

Photo credit: NBC News, 7–8 November 2000.