doomscroll / doomscrolling

Ellen Muehlberger’s tweet of 14 March 2020 that used the term doomscrolling and precipitated widespread use of the term

7 December 2020

Doomscrolling is a textbook example of how a slang term moves from its original niche to the mainstream culture. Most slang terms bubble along in niche use for some period, often years, before some event causes them to explode into the public consciousness. This pattern is precisely what happened with doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling is the habit of moving through one’s Twitter (or other social media app) feed with a dread of what bad news one may find there. The term has particular resonance in these (last) days of Trump and (hopefully last) days of the pandemic, but it predates both of these. It did, however, explode into the general public’s and mainstream news media’s consciousness in March 2020, with apprehension about the U.S. presidential election and the pandemic.

The first use of doomscrolling as we know it appears on Twitter on 8 October 2018, when @ahSHEEK tweeted:

thank u for breaking the spell of my doom-scrolling down my feed

Note that it is hyphenated here, and the eventual shift from open to hyphenated to closed compound is another standard process of word formation.

But this is not the first association of scrolling through online media with a sense of dread. On 23 July 2011, William Todd Workman opened a blog post with:

The Money Supply, The Gold Standard and the Impending Doom

Scroll down the comments of any financial article published on Yahoo Finance and you will read predictions of impending economic disaster.

It’s not a use of the term, just a co-location of its elements, doom and scroll, but it does associate the act of scrolling an online application with dread at what one may find. Workman’s title and opening line were quoted in a number of subsequent tweets.

And two years later, in the spring of 2013, a couple of tweets carried the same co-location and association. @SarahMAnderson1 tweeted on 22 March 2013:

Since my boy's home and I'm watching James & the Giant Peach and no work is occurring as I wait for a Call of Doom...#scrolling

And @IglooLondon tweeted on 2 April 2013:

Impending sense of doom, scrolling through that.

Then three days later we see an actual use of the term doom scroll, but it’s a reference to a horizontally scrolling chyron on a television news program, not a person vertically scrolling through a social media app. @GH_Golden tweeted on 5 April 2013 about frustration while trying to watch the soap opera The Young and the Restless:

Trying to watch #YR but CBS has this impending doom scroll message about interruptions for a press conference. Ugh.

Other co-locations of doom and scroll or scrolling appear on Twitter in the mid-2010s, but they are far from common, only a dozen or so out of millions of tweets. But one from @sangster on 26 May 2017 is noteworthy because it associates a co-location of doom and scrolling with the well-established term ragescrolling which dates to 2010:

Graduated from using twitter for rage scrolling to "despondently waiting for the next sign of our doom" scrolling

Then on 19 April 2018, George Elsmere-Whitney tweets the term doom scroll, associating the actual term, not a mere co-location of its elements, with Twitter for the first time:

Actually, inspired by my last tweet, let's have a general thread of twitter accounts that bring some light to the doom scroll of despair of Twitter. Like a Follow Friday, but even more cheerful.

Chris Kimberley’s tweet using the term “doom scroll” and attaching a picture of a cute kitten

And a year later, a tweet by Chris Kimberley on 27 March 2019 again uses doom scroll:

Thanks @KTTunstall for an awesome show in Guildford last night. Genius blend of Black Horse and Black Betty I have to say! Here is something for your doom scroll to make you smile! Say hi to Bushka. [Picture of a kitten attached]

This tweet is significant because KT Tunstall is a Scottish singer-songwriter with a large Twitter following, over 96,000 as I write this. None of the other tweeters mentioned so far have especially large followings, in the low thousands at most. Tunstall had made a regular habit of asking people to post more uplifting tweets, and fans were beginning to oblige. A few weeks after Kimberley’s post, on 11 April 2019, a fan of Tunstall’s, @ChanFlan, posted a movie of a Pomeranian dog running, using the hashtag #BeatTheDoomScroll.

@ChanFlan’s tweet of a cute, Pomeranian dog running with the hashtag #BeatTheDoomScroll

To which Tunstall replied:

Excellent work from @ChanFlan in response to my new initiative to balance social media: #BeatTheDoomScroll

I shall be posting this hashtag whenever I deem necessary and you are all obliged to contribute the most joyous shit you’ve ever seen online to the thread.

The hashtag #BeatTheDoomScroll continues to this day, but it’s not exactly a global phenomenon, limited mainly to followers of Tunstall’s Twitter account. Still, the term doomscroll was out there, bubbling away, waiting for something to ignite it and cause it to explode.

That something was the COVID-19 pandemic.

On 14 March 2020, Ellen Muehlberger, a professor of classics and religion at the University of Michigan, was scrolling through the list of classes, conferences, and events that were being cancelled due to the pandemic and tweeted:

I know language work isn't the hot topic right now, but I'm recommending it strictly as a coping mechanism: do you want to keep nervously doomscrolling #onhere or do you want to brush up on that language you keep saying you want to work on?

Muehlberger explains how she came up with the term in this Twitter thread from 4 December 2020. Whether she independently coined the term or if she had seen it somewhere on Twitter and it had lingered in her subconscious until that moment, we cannot know; both are possible. In any case, use of the term exploded on Twitter. Muehlberger has a very respectable Twitter following for a professor of antiquity, some 3,850, but she can hardly be categorized an “influencer.” But she had enough of a following to provide the spark, while the pandemic and fears about the outcome of the upcoming election provided the accelerant.

Within ten days, the mainstream news media had taken notice of the term. From the Winnipeg Free Press of 24 March 2020:

Some of this time was spent doing what Twitter users have dubbed “doomscrolling," and constantly refreshing for pandemic updates.

The same day two entries for doomscrolling were entered into Urbandictionary.com:

When you keep scrolling through all of your social media feeds, looking for the most recent upsetting news about the latest catastrophe. The amount of time spent doing this is directly proportional to how much worse you're going to feel after you're done.

Dude! Stop doomscrolling, It's only going to make you feel worse!

I can't! The dopamine loop is too strong!

And:

Obsessively reading social media posts about how utterly fucked we are.

I've got to stop doomscrolling about covid-19, it's making me depressed.

Four days after that, on 28 March 2020, on the other side of the world, the Times of India was discussing the term:

Tasked with sitting home, helpless against the pandemic, I’ve nonetheless read innumerable articles and WhatsApp forwards and tweets about it. (There’s new slang for this inability to look away from apocalyptic news-feeds: “doomscrolling.”)

Not all slang terms become global phenomena, but when they do, the pattern is usually the same. The term appears in various meanings, forms, and co-locations until a small number of users come to a canonical form and sense. Then it continues along for a while, being used by a small in-group, gradually growing in popularity, when suddenly something happens to bring it to the attention of society at large.

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Sources:

@ahSHEEK. Twitter, 8 October 2018.

@ChanFlan. Twitter, 11 April 2019.

@GH_Golden. Twitter, 5 April 2013.

@IglooLondon. Twitter, 2 April 2013.

@sangster. Twitter, 26 May 2017.

Anderson, Sarah M. (@SarahMAnderson1). Twitter, 22 March 2013.

Costopoulos, Andre. “On the Origin of Doomscrolling.” Archeothoughts, 6 July 2020.

Elsmere-Whitney, George (@caramelattekiss), Twitter, 19 April 2018.

Jha, Rega. “What to Do About Bad News You Can Do Nothing About.” The Times of India, 28 March 2020.

Kimberley, Chris (@ChrisJKimbers). Twitter, 27 March 2019.

Muehlberger, Ellen (@emuehlebe). Twitter, 14 March 2020.

Tunstall, KT (@KTTunstall). Twitter, 11 April 2019.

Urbandictionary.com, 24 March 2020, s.v. doomscrolling.

Workman, William Todd. “The Money Supply, The Gold Standard and the Impending Doom.” Ezinearticles.com, 23 July 2011.

Zoratti, Jen. “Put the Social into Social Distancing.” Winnipeg Free Press, 24 March 2020, C1. Factiva.

battery (electrical)

Benjamin Franklin’s Leyden-jar battery at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia

4 December 2020

Very often, so-called “coinages” by famous people are not actually the first use of the word. Famous people often get credit for coinages because either their writing survives when that of less famous people disappears into the mists of time or because people read the works of famous people, while those of the less famous languish unopened on library shelves. (The latter is becoming less common in this age of digitization and full-text search.) This is further compounded by the fact that it is rare for the actual first use of a word to be recorded at all. It happens with some regularity with scientific and technical terms, but not for most words. But sometimes a famous person does actually coin a word.

Such is the case with the electrical sense of the word battery, which was coined by Benjamin Franklin. And in this case, it is a technical term, and Franklin was well-known for his experiments in electricity. He was a serious and well-respected scientist. (During his lifetime, Franklin was perhaps the most famous North American, surpassing even George Washington in global celebrity.) So, it does not seem odd that he would coin such a term.

Franklin used the term electrical battery twice in a letter describing his electrical experiments to Peter Collinson, one of the founders of the Royal Society and a patron of the American Philosophical Society, which had been founded by Franklin. The exact date of the letter is somewhat uncertain, as the published version contains two dates. The first, at the head of the letter is 1748. Then at the end, Franklin signs it with the date 29 April 1749. It’s possible he started the letter in one year and finished it in the next—it is a long letter, and the gap between New Year’s Day and 29 April is not that extreme when one considers under the calendar of that time the new year started on 25 March; so Franklin may have penned the letter over the course of a little more than a month. Or perhaps, like many of us do today at the start of a new year, he simply wrote the wrong year before correcting it later. Another possibility is that one of the dates could be a later editorial intervention. (I haven’t examined the actual manuscript or facsimile thereof, only the published version.)

Franklin describes and names his battery thusly:

Upon this we made what we called an electrical-battery, consisting of eleven panes of large sash-glass, arm'd with thin leaden plates, pasted on each side, placed vertically, and supported at two inches distance on silk cords, with thick hooks of leaden wire, one from each side, standing upright, distant from each other, and convenient communications of wire and chain, from the giving fide of one pane, to the receiving side of the other.

Then at the close of the letter, Franklin outlines some impractical, but entertaining, uses of electricity:

Chagrined a little that we have been hitherto able to produce nothing in this way of use to mankind; and the hot weather coming on, when electrical experiments are not so agreeable, it is proposed to put an end to them for this season, somewhat humorously, in a party of pleasure, on the banks of Skuylkil. Spirits, at the same time, are to be fired by a spark sent from side to side through the river, without any other conductor than the water; an experiment which we some time since performed, to the amazement of many. A turkey is to be killed for our dinner by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical  jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle: when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France, and Germany, are to be drank in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery.

Franklin probably used battery because the array of Leyden jars that formed his device resembled, after a fashion, an artillery battery.

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Sources:

Franklin, Benjamin. “Letter IV: To Peter Collinson.” Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America. London: David Henry, 1769, 28, 37–38. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Photo credit: Adam Cooperstein, 2013, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

gung ho

Women spinning thread underneath a sign with the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives “gung ho” logo, c. 1940

3 December 2020

The oft-told tale is that U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson introduced the phrase gung-ho, meaning enthusiastic, eager, into the English language. The story has a germ of truth in that Carlson did a lot to popularize the phrase and associate it with the military, but he did not introduce the phrase into English, and it had a degree of currency among English speakers before he came along.

Gung-ho comes from the Mandarin 工合 or gōnghé. It is a clipping of the name of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, 工業合作社 or Gōngyè Hézuòshè, which was a movement started in 1937 in Shanghai to develop grassroots industry in China in response to the Japanese invasion. The idea was to mobilize small groups of displaced and unemployed workers under a framework of a larger infrastructure.

The phrase in this context first appeared in English-language newspapers in 1939. From the Washington, D.C. Sunday Star of 19 November 1939:

A red blunted triangle inscribed with the white character “Kung Ho,” meaning “We Work Together,” is the insignia of these Chinese industrials. It appears upon the some 50 products they turn out.

The gung-ho spelling appeared in a 19 February 1941 article in the daily version of the same paper:

If Wendell Willkie carries out his reported plans to visit China in pursuance of his zest for personal observation of conditions in a war-torn world, it’s believed that study of China’s so-call “guerilla industry” would be one of the magnets drawing him thither. It is the great Chines industrial co-operative scheme known as Gung-ho, which means “work together.”

And Helen Foster Snow, under the pseudonym Nym Wales, one of the expatriates who helped organize the C.I.C. movement, penned a 1941 book on the topic, in which she gives the origin of the phrase:

In Chinese the term is Chung Kuo Kung Yeh Ho Tso Hsieh Hui—Chinese Industrial Cooperative Association. It is popularly called “Kung Ho” or “Gung Ho” from the two characters meaning “Work Together,” which appear in its triangle trademark. In English is it referred to as the “C.I.C. Movement.”

Later in the book, she describes the movement’s popularity:

Again one who had been a child worker at the age of ten, and had had twenty years of city factory life, with its strikes, its long hours, its trickery and so on. And how much the C.I.C. meant to him and his whole co-op. He has made a “Kung Ho” in grass outside his co-op ... An ex-school teacher from occupied territory, and an ex-Red Cross man with famine work experience, and now chairman of a surgical gauze co-op. And so-on—they were an encouraging crowd.

“It was fun to pass a lone kid, doing his morning job by a grave mound, and singing lustily the co-op song, while he tied up the tapes around him—“All for One and One for All.”

“I have just come in after having an afternoon with Miss Jen— looking at some of her women's work. It is really good. We passed a bunch of six-year olds marching down the loess valley road from the school which was housed in a temple vacated by the soldiers because they wanted to help “kung ho.” The kids were singing “Ch'i Lai" in good kung-ho fashion.”

There was a newsreel about the C.I.C. movement in China that was shown in U.S. movie theaters, as evidenced by a 13 September 1941 advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner:

“Gung Ho”
(In Chinese “Work Together”)
With Regan “Tex” McCrary”

1941 advertisement for a New Jersey bank that uses “Gung Ho” as a slogan

And a Plainfield, New Jersey bank even used gung-ho in a 20 September 1941 advertisement:

工合 ... Pronounced “Gung ho!”
It is the slogan that’s inspiring all China today.
It means, “Work together”
It’s a good slogan for America.

Here is where Carlson and the marines come in. Before the United States’ entry into WWII, Carlson had served several tours of duty in China, including one as a military observer to the Chinese army in its fight against the Japanese. His duties in this post included assessing Chinese industrial capacity, which is where he became familiar with and enamored by the C.I.C. movement. In February 1942, he was placed in command of the newly formed Second Marine Raider Battalion, a special operations or commando unit. He chose gung-ho as the unit’s motto.

On 17 August 1942, the Second Raider Battalion raided the island of Butaritari, known to the Americans as Makin Atoll, in the Gilbert Islands, and the action and Carlson’s unit received considerable press coverage over the following weeks. (The unit’s P.R. angle was helped by the fact that James Roosevelt, the president’s son, was Carlson’s executive officer.) For instance, this Associated Press piece appeared on 28 August 1942:

Colonel Carlson explained that in organizing the battalion he preached an old Chinese saying “Kung Ho,” which means “Work and Harmony.” This became the byword of the battalion.

And this International News Service piece on 8 September 1942:

“‘Gung Ho’ Battle Cry of Carlson Raiders.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (INS)—The new battle cry of “Carlson’s Raiders,” who besieged the Japanese base on Makin island August 17, today is ‘Gung Ho,’ or in English, ‘Work Together.’”

There was even a 1943 Hollywood movie, starring Randolph Scott, made about the raid and titled Gung Ho!

As a result, gung ho was catapulted from a term that was somewhat familiar to some English speakers to one that was known by all, and the term’s focus and ethos also shifted from industry to the military.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “Marines’ Island Raid Hit Japs Hard Blow.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 28 August 1942, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Evans, Jessie Fant. “China’s Co-operatives Form a New Wall, Visitor Says.” Sunday Star (Washington, DC), 19 November 1939, C-10. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. gung-ho, adj.

International News Service. “‘Gung Ho’ Battle Cry of Carlson Raiders.” Times-Union (Albany, New York). 8 September 1942, 6. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Newsreel Theater” (advertisement). Sacramento Bee, 7 March 1942, 15. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gung ho, n.

Plainfield National Bank (advertisement). Plainfield Courier-News (New Jersey), 20 September 1941, 18. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Snow, Helen Foster (as Nym Wales). China Builds for Democracy: A Story of Cooperative Industry. New York: Modern Age Books, 1941, 43, 72. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Telenews (advertisement). San Francisco Examiner, 13 September 1941, 28. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wile, Frederic William. “Washington Observations.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 19 February 1941, A-13. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credits: unknown photographer, 1940s, Spinning thread, China. Alley, Rewi, 1897-1987: Photographs. Ref: PA1-o-899-04-3. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand; Plainfield National Bank (advertisement). Plainfield Courier-News (New Jersey), 20 September 1941, 18. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

gun

Mons Meg, a fifteenth-century, 510mm (20 inches) bombard housed at Edinburgh Castle

2 December 2020

While we don’t know the origin with absolute certainty, the word gun appears to come from the woman’s name Gunnhildr, which is a compound of two Old Norse words, gunnr and hildr, which both mean war. Giving a weapon a woman’s name is hardly an unusual practice. Two famous examples are the fifteenth-century bombard in Edinburgh Castle known as Mons Meg (it was made in Mons in what is now Belgium) and the 420mm German WWI howitzer dubbed Big Bertha by Allied soldiers.

The word dates to the fourteenth century. From an inventory of munitions at Windsor Castle conducted in 1330–31:

Una magna balista de cornu quæ vocatur Domina Gunilda.

(A great ballista of horn which is called Lady Gunilda.)

A ballista is essentially a giant crossbow. So, in early use, gun would appear to refer to any kind of siege engine. But only a few years later an inventory of the Guildhall of London in September 1339 uses guns to refer to gunpowder cannons:

Item, in Camera Gildaulæ sunt sex Instrumenta de latone, vocitata Gonnes, et quinque roleres ad eadem. Item, peletæ de plumbo pro eisdem Instrumentis, quæ ponderant iiiie libræ et dimidium. Item, xxxii libræ de pulvere pro dictis Instrumentis.

(Item, in a room of the Guildhall are six instruments of brass, called guns, and five wheels of the same. Item, balls of lead for the same instruments, which weighing four hundredweight and a half pounds. Item, thirty-two pounds of powder for these instruments.)

Although these early appearances are in Latin texts, the word gun does not appear to be native Latin, but rather represents an English word. Note that both texts say the devices are “called” guns; they don’t say they “are” guns. This use of vocare is typical when the word is being glossed in another language.

Outside of the context of inventories, we see the word appear in the romance Sir Ferumbras, c. 1380. The text here makes a distinction between guns and ballistas or crossbows:

Þat wanne þe frensche þyderward; caste stones oþer tre,
Þay scholde with hure scheldes hard; kepe þe dent aȝe;
& summe scholde schete to þe frencshe rout; with gunnes & boȝes of brake,
Þat þay ne beo hardy to lokie out; defense aȝen hem to make.
And on þat oþer stage amidde; ordeynt he gunnes grete,
And oþer engyns y-hidde; wilde fyr to cast & schete.

(That when the French cast stones or trees in that direction,
They should with their hard shields keep the blows back;
& some would shoot, to the woe of the French, with guns and crossbows,
So that they would not be so valiant as to look out; making a defense against them.
And in that middle tier; he prepared the great guns,
And other hidden engines, to cast & shoot wildfire.)

The he in the penultimate line refers to the French engineer in charge of the siege. I have translated boȝes of brake as crossbows; literally it reads “bows of the crank.” It’s unclear whether the poet here meant guns to refer to gunpowder cannons or some other type of siege engine, but he may have meant cannons. Gunpowder cannons appeared in China c.1000 C.E. and in Europe in the fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, written at about the same time, c.1378–80, makes mention of early gunpowder weapons:

That thrughout every regioun
Wente this foule trumpes soun,
As swifte as pelet out of gonne,
Whan fyr is in the poudre ronne.
And swiche a smoke gan out-wende
Out of his foule trumpes ende,
Blak, bloo, grenyssh, swartish reed,
As doth where that men melte leed,
Loo, al on high fro the tuel.

(So that throughout every region
Went this foul trumpet’s sound,
As swift as a pellet out of a gun,
When fire is in the powder run.
And such a smoke began to wend
Out of his foul trumpet’s end,
Black, blue, greenish, darkest red,
As does where men melt lead,
Lo, all on high from the chimney.)

Overtime, the non-firearm senses of gun dropped away, and the word came to be used to refer to a firearm of any caliber. Although, in my Army training I learned a more restrictive technical definition. According to this definition, a gun is large-caliber, high-velocity weapon with a flat trajectory, such as on a tank or a naval ship. Howitzers, which are large caliber but with relatively low muzzle velocities and arcing trajectories, and rifles and pistols, which are small caliber (i.e., small arms), are not guns. But this technical definition is not generally observed.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. House of Fame. The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, lines 1641–49, 367.

Herrtage, Sidney J., ed. The English Charlemagne Romances, Part I: Sir Ferumbras. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 34. London: Oxford UP, 1879, lines 3261–66, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 33).

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, gun, n.

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Memorials of London and London Life. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia, 2008.

Guinea

A 1663 guinea coin with the head of Charles II above a small elephant on the obverse and the shields of the four countries of the United Kingdom on the reverse

1 December 2020

Guinea is a word with many seemingly unrelated senses but which are actually connected. It can refer to one of several countries in Africa, a sum of British money equaling £1.05, or it can be a derogatory name for an Italian American.

The word first appears as a European name for the west coast of Africa. The name’s origin unknown, but it appears first in Portuguese as Guiné. This toponymic use survives today in the names of the countries of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. Guinea makes its English language appearance in a 1555 translation of Pietro Martire Anghiera’s The Decades of the New Worlde:

The thyrde day of October abowt mydnyght, the capytayne commaunded theym to lyght fyrebrandes and to hoyse vp theyr sayles directynge theyr course towarde the South, saylynge betwene Capo Verde of Affryke and the Ilandes lyinge abowt the same, beinge from the Equinoctiall .xiiii. degrees and a halfe. They sayled thus, manye dayes in the syght of the coaste of Guinea, of Ethiope, where is the mountayne cauled Serra Liona beinge .viii. degrees aboue the Equinoctiall.

Guinea quickly became an adjective referring to anything from or having to do with Africa. A Guinea-man, for instance, was a ship that conducted trade, in slaves as well as in other cargo, with Africa. And in British North America, guinea came to denote a slave from Africa, as opposed to one born in the Americas. From an 18 April 1745 Boston newspaper:

That three Privateers belonging to New York, commanded by Capts. Langdon, Morgan and Jeffries, had brought in a Sloop to New Providence, which they took on the Spanish Main (deserted by all the Men except a Dutch Man and 4 Guinea Negroes,) on board of which they have found between 50 and 60,000 Dollars.

And by the early nineteenth century, Guinea was functioning as a noun referring to any Black person. From James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 The Pioneers:

But damn the bit of manners has the fellow any more than if he was one of them Guineas, down in the kitchen there.

And it continued to refer to Black and mixed-race people well into the twentieth century. For instance, a particular group of mixed race people in and around Barbour County, West Virginia went by that name. From Hu Maxwell’s 1899 history of that county, which reflects the racist attitudes that others held about them:

There is a clan of partly-colored people in Barbour County often called “Guineas,” under the erroneous presumption that they are Guinea negroes. They vary in color from white to black, often have blue eyes and straight hair, and they are generally industrious. Their number in Barbour is estimated at one thousand.

But in the late nineteenth century, Guinea came to be used as a derogatory name for Italian-Americans, and eventually other ethnicities from the Mediterranean region. Exactly why is unknown. It may be because many people from the Mediterranean have darker complexions than those typical of northern Europeans, or it may have been an epithet pointing to their place on the social ladder alongside Blacks. This appearance in the New York Tribune of 17 July 1882 shows that early use may have specifically been in reference to those born in Italy, as opposed to Italian-Americans born in North America, before expanding to include all Italian-Americans, an expansion that parallels the term’s expansion from those born in Africa to eventually include all Black people:

The “hoodlum” of New-York, with his senses deadened to the beauty of the Latin tongue and mellow Neapolitan accent, has bestowed upon the races that use it with volubility the names of “Guineas” and “Dagoes.”
[...]
The chances are strongly in favor of their receiving a shower of stones on the way, from the ragged gamins in the street, who cry out at every fresh arrival of Guineas. But they are soon with their countrymen, and when they see on every side Italian signs over the doorways and swart Italian faces peering out the windows, they feel themselves perfectly at home.

That leaves us with how guinea came to be associated with British currency. In 1663, the Royal Mint began issuing a gold coin, nominally worth 20 shillings, for use by the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa. As with other things associated with Africa, the coin quickly acquired the name guinea. From Samuel Pepys diary of 29 October 1666:

And so to my goldsmith to bid him look out for some gold for me; and he tells me that Ginnys, which I bought 2000 of not long ago, and cost me but 18½d change, will now cost me 22d, and but very few to be had at any price.

The sums that Pepys refers to are the fees charged by the goldsmith for converting silver into gold. The coin fluctuated in value, eventually ending up with a nominal value of 21 shillings before it stopped being issued in 1813. But the name guinea survived, mainly in specialty applications like gambling on horse racing, in the sense of 21 shillings, or in today’s decimal currency, £1.05.

So, that’s it. While the different senses seem, on the surface, to be unrelated, they all go back to Africa.

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Sources:

Anghiera, Pietro Martire. The Decades of the New Worlde. Richard Eden, trans. London: Guilhelmi Powell for Edwarde Sutton, 1555, 217r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO)

The Boston Weekly News-Letter, 18 April 1745, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers, vol. 3 of 3. London: John Murray, 1823, 106. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. Guinea, n.1.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. guinea, n.1.

“The Italian Quarter.” The New York Tribune, 17 July 1882, 8. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Maxwell, Hu. The History of Barbour County, West Virginia (1899). Parsons, West Virginia: McClain Printing, 1968, 310. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 7 of 10. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1972, 346. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Sovereign Rarities, Vcoins.com.