goody two-shoes

November 6, 2020

6 November 2020

Words, like people, sometimes have a seamy underbelly that belies their innocent countenance. Such is the case with the phrase goody two-shoes. To be a goody two-shoes is to be well behaved, to follow the rules, and perhaps to be a bit smug about those who do not.

This sense comes from an anonymous 1765 children’s morality tale published by John Newberry, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. The story is that of Margery Meanwell, who is orphaned, along with her brother Tommy Meanwell. Margery in rags and with only one shoe, is given a pair of shoes by a kindly gentleman. Her fortunes begin to change at that moment. She works hard, marries well, comes into wealth, and then uses that wealth to help the poor.

Present-day speakers often interpret the goody as a reference to the quality of being good, but it is originally a term of address akin to Mrs. It is short for Goodwife, which existed alongside its male counterpart Goodman.

But Margery Meanwell was not the first to bear that appellation.

The designation Goodman Two-Shoes was first applied to John Hewson in 1659. Hewson was a cobbler by trade who served as a colonel in Cromwell’s New Model Army. He was one of the signers of Charles I’s death warrant, thus committing regicide, and later sat in the Upper House, the Commonwealth’s equivalent to the House of Lords. Upon the restoration of the monarchy, Hewson fled to the Continent, where he died in 1662.

Hewson, because he had been a cobbler, was referred to as a goodman two shoes in this 1659 pamphlet calling for his being brought to justice:

Was the black Rod do you think, ever intended or designed to whip Coblers? or will Princes Robes sit handsom on Brewers backs, and yet this goodman two shoes, by a relish and smack of Lordly Dignity, did confidently personate that pretended Honour, and acted not barely as a Lord in his late Riot and Tumult, but usurped the Authority and Power as if he had been our Lord Mayor.

By 1673, Goodman Two-Shoes was being used as an epithet for a common man, one of ordinary position and tastes. Here is a 1673 tract by John Eachard in which two characters, Philautus and Timothy, debate Thomas Hobbes philosophy:

Tim. Not a word, Sir, and 'twas well for the poor Gentleman, Philautus, that you were so nigh at hand; or else, by chance, he might have gone to Bedlam, for want of a Trainer. But suppose, Sir, instead of the Roman penny, he had asked what was the reason that Ginger is spelt with a G, and Jeopardy with an J. Must he needs have gone for't: could not you have dropt down a little soder, and relief upon such an unfortunate extravagancy?
Phi. What's that to you Goodman-two-shoes: am I bound to acquaint you with all that I can do?
Tim. Nay, I hope no offence, Sir: for I am confident you that have such excellent skill at putting a thought off the squat, could have easily don't.

And this passage from a 1689 poem by Charles Cotton uses the epithet of Goody Two-Shoes for a complaining woman:

But now into th'Pottage each deep his Spoon claps,
As in truth one might safely for burning one's chaps,
When streight, with the look and the tone of a Scold,
Mistress May'ress complain'd that the Pottage was cold,
And all long of your fiddle-saddle, quoth she;
Why, what then, Goody two-shoes, what if it be?
Hold you, if you can, your tittle-tattle, quoth he.

And this passage from the 1690 anonymous “An Answer to Clemons Alexandrinus’s Sermon Upon Quis Dives Salvetur?” shows the disregard in which a Goodman Two Shoes is held:

I have before insinuated, that a good rich witty Man may do any thing but be damn'd. But I see some People pricking up their Ears there. You Goodman Two shoes, and you Gammer Two shoes, and you Tom Trap, and you Dick Frost, and you Goody Gurton, that have lain in Straw ever since your Bed was taken away for Plunder in the Civil Wars, let me tell ye, you are poor stupid Wretches; your duller Flame will be more easily exstinguish'd; you meaner sinful Scrubs are generally given over to a reprobate Mind; your Barley Bread and Pease Pudding make you heavy and stupid, and if you don't take care you will die as stupidly as you liv'd.

So, the author of the 1765 children’s story took an epithet for a commoner, stripped away its negative association, made it literal in that Margery is given two shoes, and due to the book’s popularity (it was in its third edition within a year) the name Goody Two-Shoes cleaned up its act, hid its disreputable past, and took on a new meaning.

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Sources:

“An Answer to Clemons Alexandrinus’s Sermon Upon Quis Dives Salvetur? What Rich Man Can Be Saved. London: 1690. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Cotton, Charles. Poems on Several Occasions. London: Thomas Bassett, 1689, 184. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Eachard, John. Some Opinions of Mr. Hobbs Considered in a Second Dialogue Between Philautus and Timothy. London: J. Macock for Walter Kettilby, 1673, 12–13. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, third edition. London: J. Newberry, 1766. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“The Outcry of the London Prentices for Justices to be Executed upon John Lord Hewson.” London: Gustavus Adolphus, 1659, 4. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2014, s.v., goody-two-shoes, n. and adj., goodman, n., goody, n.1.

Image Credit: British Library.

canvas / canvass

November 5, 2020

A man examining a punch-card ballot in the 2000 U. S. presidential election in Florida

5 November 2020

The verb to canvass and the noun canvas come from the same root; they are simply spelling variations. But how does a type of stiff, coarse fabric morph into a verb meaning to tally votes? It’s a long and tortured history, that involves torture—of a sort—sifting and segregating, marijuana, and post-election chicanery.

Canvas comes into English from the Anglo-Norman canevas and eventually the Latin cannabis, the material having been originally made from hemp. Modern canvas, in contrast, is usually made from cotton or linen and polyvinyl chloride.

The word is recorded as being in existence in 1260 C.E., but the surviving record is a modern transcript. We also have it in various accounts and ledgers from thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England that were written in Latin. But one of the earliest surviving uses in English is from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canon Yeoman’s Tale:

The mullok on an heep ysweped was,
And on the floor ycast a canevas,
And al this mullok in a syve ythrowe,
And sifted, and ypiked many a throwe.
(The debris was swept into a heap,
And on the floor was cast a canvas,
And all this debris was thrown into a sieve,
And sifted and picked through many times.)

Exactly what process is being described here is uncertain. The canvas cloth could simply be a means of collecting and transporting the debris, or it could be part of the sifting mechanism, for canvas was used for that purpose. In any case, the fact that canvas is associated with sifting and segregating from very early in the word’s history is significant for the development of the later senses.

By the early sixteenth century, canvas was being used as a verb meaning to toss a person about on a canvas sheet, either as a game or for punishment. We know this because it survives in a ledger that indicates a boy was paid eight pence for being so tossed about for the amusement of the Duke of Buckingham on 22 May 1508:

to a child of the kitchen, being “kanwased” before my Lord, 8.d.

Over the coming decades the verb to canvas would generalize and come to mean to be buffeted or knocked about. It also begins to acquire the second < s >. Eventually the noun would come to be spelled with one < s > and the verb with two, but it would take some centuries for this to become the standard practice.

But the verb also came to mean to scrutinize or investigate something or some matter. This sense is a form of metaphorical sifting, examining a matter to separate the good parts from the bad. It appears in a rather ambiguous entry in John Palsgrave’s 1530 English–French dictionary:

kanuas a dogge or a mater / Ie trafficque.prime.coniu. This mater hath be ca[n]uassed in dede: De fait on a trafficque cest affaire de mesmes.

Palsgrave gives the French equivalent of to canvass as trafiquer, a verb of the first conjugation, and gives two distinct senses for the verb. The first sense is to engage in a sale of something, such as one might buy or sell a dog, like the English to traffic in some good. But there is little other evidence of this ever being a sense of the English verb to canvass. The second sense is to engage in a matter or subject, and here Palsgrave becomes more ambiguous. The French verb carries with it a sense of illicit or illegitimate trade, and in French to traffic in a matter is to tamper with it. Whether Palsgrave is simply making mistakes here about the meaning of the French verb or if he is capturing a particular, and probably ephemeral, sense of the English word I cannot tell.

But we get an unambiguous use of to canvass meaning to thoroughly investigate or debate a matter a few decades later. From a 21 March 1573 letter from writer Gabriel Harvey to John Young, the master of Pembroke College, Cambridge:

Sutch matters have bene thurrouly canvissid long ago: and everi on that can do ani thing is able to write hole volumes of them, and make glorius shows with them.

The verb entered politics in the next century, with a sense of soliciting support for a candidate or issue. This sense is still used today, as political parties send out volunteers to canvass neighborhoods for likely voters and ensure they get to the polls on the appointed day. Again, this sense probably developed out of the association with sifting; one sifts the electorate to find those on one’s side. This sense of the verb appears in a 1674 collection of the sayings of Francis Bacon. The man didn’t use the word himself, but his later editors did:

Queen Elizabeth being to resolve upon a great Officer, and being by some, that canvased for others, put in some doubt of that person, whom she meant to advance, called for Mr. Bacon; And told him, she was like one, with a Lanthorn, seeking a man; and seemed unsatisfied in the choice she had of a man for that place.

And in the eighteenth century a second political sense developed, one that applies after votes have been cast. This canvass refers scrutinizing of ballots for irregularities and separating out those that are fraudulent and tallying the legitimate ones. It appears in a 1724 book of English history by Gilbert Burnet in reference to an incident during an election of the mayor of London in 1682, during the reign of Charles II. While the incident occurred nearly 350 years ago, the basic outline sounds eerily familiar with something that could happen today:

When Michaelmas day came, those who found how much they had been deceived in Moor resolved to choose a Mayor that might be depended on. The poll was closed when the Court thought they had the majority: But upon casting it up it appeared they had lost it: So they fell to canvass it: And they made such exceptions to those of the other side, that they discounted as many voices as gave them the majority. This was also managed in to gross a manner, that it was visible the Court was resolved by fair or foul means to have the government of the City in their own hands.

The court here is Charles II and his courtiers, not a court of law. This sense of canvass meaning to scrutinize and tally the ballots after they have been cast fell out of use in Britain, but it has continued to be used in the United States. From the laws of New York of 1778:

That such committee shall be annually appointed by resolutions of each body respectively and shall meet at the secretary's office of this State on the said last Tuesday in May; at which meeting the said joint committee or the major part of them or the survivors of them or the major part of such survivors shall on the said day and on so many days next succeeding thereto as shall be necessary for the purpose proceed to open the aforesaid boxes one after the other and the inclosures therein respectively and canvas and estimate the votes therein contained.

A long way, indeed, from thirteenth-century ledgers to twenty-first century election security.

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Sources:

Brewer, J. S., ed. “Accounts of the Duke of Buckingham.” Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 3 of 21, part 1. London: Longmans, et al., 1867, 497. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Burnet, Gilbert. Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, vol. 1 of 2. London: Thomas Ward, 1724, 530. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon Yeoman’s Tale” (c. 1395). The Canterbury Tales. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website. 8.938–41.

A Collection of Apophthegms, New and Old, by the Right Honorable Francis Bacon. London: Andrew Crooke, 1674, 9–10. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Laws of the State of New York (1778), vol. 1 of 5. Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1886, §16, 33. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, canvas, n., canvass, n, canvass, v.

Palsgrave, John. Lesclarissement de la Langue Francoyse. London: Richard Pynson, 1530, fol. 270v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Rogers, James Thorold. A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (vol. 2 of 8). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1866, 511. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Scott, Edward John Long, ed. Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey. Westminster: Nichols and Sons for the Camden Society, 1884, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Mark Foley, 2000, State Library and Archives of Florida.

golf

November 5, 2020

5 November 2020

The word golf is of unknown origin. There are a number of hypotheses as to its origin, floating about, but none seem likely.

We do know, however, that the game is Scottish in origin and dates to at least the mid fifteenth century. An act of the Scottish parliament under James II in 1457 outlawed the game, along with football, because it was thought to distract from military training and readiness. In other words, young men should be practicing archery and swordsmanship rather than playing games. The law was promulgated in two versions. The more complete one reads:

ITEM, It is decreeted & ordained, that the weaponschawings be halden be the Lords and Barronnes Spiritual and Temporal, foure times in the zeir. And that the fute-bal and golfe be vtterly cryed downe, and not to be vsed.

A weaponschawing, literally weapons-showing, is an archaic Scots term for a military readiness review. To cry down is to condemn or make unlawful.

And a second reads more succinctly:

And as tuichande þe futball and þe golf we ordane it to be punyst be þe baronys vnlawe.

How similar the 1457 version of golf (and that of football as well) is to the present-day game I cannot tell you. I’m an expert on language, not a sports historian.

As to the hypotheses, the leading one seems to be that it comes from the Dutch kolf, meaning club, and the Dutch word is used in a number of ball and stick games. But in Dutch, the game is called kolven, and kolf is not used for the game itself. Furthermore, there is no evidence of the game ever being called by a word with an initial /k/ in Scots.

A second hypothesis is that it comes from the Scots gowf, meaning a blow or strike, and indeed the game is sometimes called this in Scotland. But this word isn’t attested until the eighteenth century, far too late for it to be the origin.

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Sources:

The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, vol. 2. Edinburgh: 1814, 48. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL), 2002, s.v. wapynschawin(g, n., gowf, n.1, v.1., gowf, n.2, v.2.

The Lawes and Actes of Parliament, Maid Be King James the First and His Successors Kinges of Scotland. Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1597, 41. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Photo credit: Shawn Carpenter, 2010, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

nail-biter

November 4, 2020

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

November 4, 2020

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.