handicap

10 December 2020

Handicap is a word without an obvious origin. It’s used in sports, notably horse racing and golf, and it is used to refer to a person’s physical or mental disability, although the use of the word in this context is no longer considered appropriate. The meaning in these contexts is clear, but why this particular combination of phonemes should come to mean these seemingly disparate things is not clear.

Handicap originally referred to a means of leveling an unequal competition or exchange. The method is, perhaps, best described in this passage from the 1751 Sporting Kalendar, which is also an early extant use of the term in reference to horse racing:

A Handy-Cap Match, is for A. B. and C. to put an equal Sum into a Hat., C. which is the Handy-Capper, makes a Match for A. and B. which when perused by them, they put the Hands into their Pockets and draw them out closed, then they open them together, and if both have Money in their Hands, the Match is confirmed; if neither have money it is no Match: In both Cases the Hand-Capper [sic] draws all the Money out of the Hat; but if one has Money in his Hand, and the other none, then it is no Match; and, he that has the Money in his Hand is intitled to the Deposit in the Hat.

If a Match is made without the Weight being mentioned, each Horse must carry ten Stone.

But the method is considerably older. An early form is described in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman. From the C-text version of the poem, written c. 1390. This description doesn’t have the hands or the hat, but it does involve choosing an umpire to decide how to equalize an exchange of goods. The method acquired the name new fair, after the London market held on Soper’s Lane (present-day Queen Street, Cheapside) that developed a reputation for being a haunt of thieves and disreputable characters before being shut down in 1297. In Langland’s account, Clement the Cobbler wishes to exchange his cloak for Hicke the Ostler’s hood. The umpire deems the hood worth more, and Clement must buy Hick a cup of beer to make up the difference, and if any complain about the exchange being unfair, they must buy a round of drinks for those present:

Clement the coblere cast of his cloke,
And at the newe fayre nempnede hit to sull.
Hicke the hakenayman hit his hod aftur
And bade Bette the bocher ben on his syde.
There were chapmen ychose this chaffare to preyse,
That ho-so hadde the hood sholde nat haue the cloke
And that the bettere thyng, be arbitreres, bote sholde the worse.
Tho rysen vp in rape and rounned togyderes,
And preisede this penworths apart by hemsulue,
And there were othes an heep, for on sholde haue the worse.
They couthe nat by here consience acorden for treuthe
Til Robyn the ropere aryse they bisouhte
And nempned hym for a noumper, that no debat were.

Hicke the hostiler hadde the cloke
In couenaunt that Clement should the coppe fill
And haue Hickes hood the hostiler and holde hym yserued.
And ho-so repentede hym rathest sholde aryse aftur
And grete syre Glotoun with a galoun of ale.

(Clement the cobbler cast off his cloak,
And at the new fair offered it for sale.
Hicke the hackneyman offered his hood in exchange,
And asked Bette the butcher to be on his side.
There were merchants chosen to appraise these goods,
So that whoever had the hood should not also have the cloak
But that the better thing, according to the arbiters, that the lesser should be compensated.
Who rose up in haste and whispered together,
And themselves appraised it openly as a pennyworth.
And there were others in the crowd, for one was bound to come off the worse.
They, in truth, could not by their conscience agree
Until Robin the roper arose and they begged,
And named him the umpire, that there would be no dispute.

Hicke, the ostler, had the cloak
On the condition that Clement fill the cup
and have Hicke the ostler’s hood and hold himself well served.
And whoever regretted first should rise after
And greet Sir Glutton with a gallon of ale.)

The name handicap is applied to the game by 1653, when it appears in George Daniel’s Idyllia:

Ev'n those who now command, The inexorable Roman, were but what One step had given: Handy-Capps in Fate.

And Samuel Pepys makes mention of a game called handicap in his Diary of 19 September 1660, but it’s not clear if this refers to some version of the exchange game or a card game of that name:

Here we were very merry and had a very good dinner—my wife coming after me hither to us. Among other pleasures, some of us fell to Handycapp, a sport that I never knew before, which was very good. We stayed till it was very late and it rained sadly; but we made shift to get coaches and so home and to bed.

And in his 1666 The English Rogue Described, Richard Head details how the subject of his book uses the exchange game to evade the authorities:

I thought it high time to put my Plot in execution, in order thereunto I demanded what difference he would take between my Hat and his, his Cloak and mine, there being small matter of advantage in the exchange, we agreed to go to handicap. In fine, There was not any thing about us of waring cloaths but we interchanged, scarce had I un-cased my self, and put on my Friends cloaths, but in came one that had dogged me, attended by the Constable, with a Warrant to seize me, who they knew by no other token but my Boarding-Mistresses Sons garments, I had stolen for my escape. They forthwith laid hold on my Companion, (finding them on him) telling him, He should severely suffer for the wrong he did his Mistress, in the abuse of her house. Full of horror and amazement, he beseeched them not to carry him before his Mistress, knowing how much he had offended her, she would have no mercy on him; this confirmed their belief, that they had found out the Offender. The more he intreated, the more deaf and inexorable were they; and whilst they were busied about their mistaken Criminal-Prisoner, I took an occasion to give them the slip, knowing that a little further discourse would rectifie their Error.

And as we’ve seen, the idea of giving the lesser side an advantage was applied to horse racing in the eighteenth century, and the general idea of handicap as some form of hindrance or disadvantage is in place by the latter half of the nineteenth. From the British Medical Journal of 7 September 1872:

Other minor discrepancies need not be specially noticed in this place, but they have the effect of raising the mortality from zymotic disease in a single year from 60 to 77; an excess of 17, which, when dealing with numbers so small, is a serious handicap in the race for priority on the health-lists of England.

And some fifteen years later, handicap is used to refer to person’s physical disability. From the American Annals of the Deaf of October 1888:

For a good half of the time I am forced to other than oral communication from others in order to understand them—either gesture or writing. So that, after all these years, I am still at more or less disadvantage, for the handicap of deafness is a perpetual one.

By this time, handicap was completely divorced from the original idea of competitors signaling acceptance of a wager using hands and a cap. Because the origin is not apparent, some have speculated that the word comes from disabled people begging for money, that is from holding out their cap in their hand, an inventive, but incorrect, stab at the word’s origin.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Chamberlain, William Martin. “The Experience of a Lip-Reader.” American Annals of the Deaf, 33.4, October 1888, 273. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Head, Richard. The English Rogue Described (1666). London: Francis Kirkman, 1668, 148–49. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Langland, William. Piers Plowman (C Text, 2008). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool U Press, 2014, 136–37, 6.376–93 (Passus 7 in some editions). San Marino, Huntington Library, MS 143.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2013, s.v. handicap, n., handicap, v.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 1 of 11. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970, 248. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Pond, John. The Sporting Kalendar. London: G. Woodfall, 1751, xxi–xxii. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Wilson, Edward T. “Sanitary Statistics of Cheltenham for the Years 1865–71 Inclusive.” British Medical Journal, no. 610, 7 September 1872, 270. JSTOR.

hack (verb) / hacker

9 December 2020

The verb to hack means, of course, to cut or chop, but it also has developed a sense of to gain unauthorized access to a computer system. The connection between the two senses isn’t obvious when you look at the two ends of the word’s history, but when you fill in the gap between the two, the word’s semantic development becomes clear.

Old English had the verb ahaccian, meaning to cut, and we believe that the form *haccian also existed, although that form isn’t attested in any of the extant manuscripts. And ahaccian only appears once, in a homily about the legend of the seven sleepers. The homily was once attributed to Ælfric, but today most scholars don’t believe that he wrote it:

man sette heora heafda swilce oþra ðeofa buton ðam port-weallon on ðam heafod-stoccum, and ðær flugon sona to hrocas and hremmas and feala cynna fugelas, and þara haligra martyra eagan ut ahaccedon

(They set their heads, like those of others who were thieves, outside the town walls upon head-stakes, and immediately rooks and ravens and birds of many kinds flew there and hacked out the eyes of the holy martyrs.)

We do see the hack form in Middle English. From a twelfth century hagiography of John the Baptist:

þo cneu seint iohan þat gif he wolde þolen þat king drige his unriht he mihte liuen and ben him lief and wurð ac gif he wolde folgen ri(h)twisnesse he shoulde þerfore his lif forleten and swo did atten ende. for þat a maiden bad te kinge his heued. and he hit bad of acken. and hire bitechen. and he þat eðeliche deað admodliche þolede. and þer mid bigat eche life en blisse.

(Then Saint John knew that if he should suffer the king to commit his sin he might live and be loved and honored by him, but if he should follow righteousness he would therefore lost his life and that last. For a made bade the king for his head, and he bade it hacked off and given to her, and he that readily and meekly suffered death and therewith obtained eternal life in bliss.)

And in the thirteenth century we see hacker as a personal name, probably referring to a reaper or other agricultural worker. In records of the county of Sussex, England from 1296 we see the names Johanne Hakyere and Willmo Hakyere.

But a hacker could also be an agricultural implement, similar to a hoe. From John Trevisa’s late fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things):

And for scharpenesse and prikkynge vnnethe þornes beth yfalle or yrooted out of þe grounde wihtoute hook, bille, hakker, or som oþer egge tool.

(And because of sharpness and pricking, thorns are not easily cut or rooted out of the ground without a hook, bill, hacker, or some other edged tool.)

And that’s where things stood for several hundred years. But in early nineteenth-century America, hack began to be used as a noun meaning a try or attempt at something. We see the same semantic development in to take a cut at or to take swing at something. From Joseph Plumb Martin’s 1830 memoir of his Revolutionary War experiences:

We remained the rest of the day and the following night, expecting to have another hack at them in the morning, but they gave us the slip.

And in the 1950s, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began to use the word as a verb meaning to work on or play with a technical system. From the minutes of M.I.T.’s Tech Model Railroad Club from 5 April 1955:

Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.

The use of both working and hacking here indicates the M.I.T. students differentiated the two actions, with hacking being more playful and experimental.

In subsequent years M.I.T. students began to use the verb to hack and hacker to refer to manipulating the school’s telephone system in order to make free long-distance calls or otherwise create mayhem and to those who did so. From the school’s newspaper, The Tech, of 20 November 1963:

Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system.

[...]

The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found.

[...]

Because of the “hacking,” the majority of the MIT phones are “trapped.” They are set up so tie-line calls may not be made. Originally, these tie-lines were open to general use.

And from M.I.T. the word spread to the wider tech world, and as technology evolved, from analog telephone switches to digital computers and the internet.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1 of 3. Early English Text Society, O.S. 76 and 82. London: Oxford UP, 1885, 492. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. a-haccian.

Hudson, William. The Three Earliest Subsidies for the County of Sussex. Sussex Record Society, 10. London: Mitchell Hughes and Clarke, 1910, 101. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lichstein, Henry. “Telephone Hackers Active.” The Tech, 83.24, 20 November 1963, 1.

Martin, Joseph Plumb. A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier. Hallowell, Maine: Glazier, Masters and Co., 1830, 96. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hakker(e n. and hakken, v.

Morris, R., ed. “De Sancto Iohanne babtista.” Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century. London: N. Trübner, 1873, 139–141. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.52.

Onorato, Joseph and Mark Schupack, Tech Model Railroad Club of M.I.T.: The First Fifty Years (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 66.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. hacker, n., hack, n.1, and hack, v.1.

Seymore, M.C., et al, eds. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 2 of 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 1047. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

hack / hackney

A map of London showing the borough of Hackney in red

8 December 2020

(For the computing sense, see the hack / hacker entry.)

In present-day parlance, a hackney or hack is a taxi, and something that is hackneyed is trite and unoriginal. The word comes from Hackney, a borough of London a few miles north of the City of London.* Hackney was once marshland or wet meadow, grassland that was periodically flooded by the River Lea. In the medieval period, the area was often used as pastureland for London horses, especially those kept for hire. The placename means Haca’s island and comes from the Old English personal name Haca + ig (island, esp. fenland island), a reference to a dry area in the marshland.

In the earliest uses, a hackney is a light, riding horse, the kind that might be hired for a day’s travel, as opposed to a heavy war or farm horse. The earliest known appearance of hackney in this sense is actually in Latin. It appears in the accounts for the household of Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, for 24 May 1299 to 7 June 1299. The word also appears in Anglo-Norman French, although this is a bit later than its appearance in English. Despite the first appearance in this Latin record, the word obviously first arose in English and this Latin citation is just the oldest to survive:

In expensis Lakoc cum uno hakeney conducto de Lond' usque Canterbire pro tapetis cariandis ii s.

(In expenses, Lakoc with one hired hackney from London up to Canterbury for a worn cloth, 2 shillings.)

Lakoc is undoubtedly the name of the person in the household who incurred the expense.

While the denotation of hackney here is horse, the context is that of a hired horse—conducto is an adjective meaning hired or leased. Other early uses are not in the context of a rental, but the association seems to have been there from the beginning.

The oldest known English use is from about the same time. It appears in the romance Bevis of Hampton, found in the Auchinleck manuscript, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1. The poem was written c. 1300 and the manuscript dates from c. 1330:

King Ermin seide in is sawe,
That ner no mesager is lawe,
To ride upon an hevi stede,
That swiftli scholde don is nede.
"Ac nim a lighter hakenai
And lef her the swerd Morgelai,
And thow schelt come to Brademonde
Sone withinne a lite stounde!"
Beves an hakenai bestrit
And in his wei forth a rit
And bereth with him is owene deth,
Boute God him helpe, that alle thing seth!

(King Ermin said in his speech,
That no messenger is ever allowed
To ride upon a heavy steed,
Because it is necessary to ride swiftly.
“But take a lighter hackney
And leave here the sword Morgelai,
And you shall come to Brademonde
Soon within a little while!”
Bevis mounted a hackney
And he rode forth
And bears with him his own death,
Unless God, who sees all things, helps him.)

And we see the word again in the sense of a hired horse in the C-text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, written c. 1390, San Marino, Huntington Library, MS 143:

Ac hakeneys hadde thei none bote hakeneys to huyre;
Thenne gan Gyle to borwen hors at many gret maystres
And shop that a shereue sholde bere Mede
Softliche in sambure fram syse to syse,
And Fals and Fauel fecche forth sysores
And ryde on hem and on reues righte faste by Mede.

(But of hackneys they had nothing but hackneys for hire;
Then Giles went to borrow horses from many great masters
And arranged that a sheriff should bear Mede
Softly on a lady’s horse from assize to assize,
And Falsehood and Deceit fetched forth jurymen’s [horses]
And rode on them and on reeves’ [horses] very close to Mede.)

This sense of a hired horse would eventually transfer to a hired coach and later to a taxi, both horse-drawn and later automotive.

The clipping hack, meaning a hired coach or taxi appears in the early modern era. The Faversham Borough records of 1571 contain a reference to a hackeman. And Aphra Behn’s 1676 play The Town-Fopp contains a use of hack, meaning a hired coach:

But 'faith Sir, you're mistaken, her Fortune shall not go to the maintenance of your Misses, which being once sure of, she, poor Soul, is sent down to the Countrey house, to learn Housewifery, and live without Mankind, unless she can serve her self with the handsom Steward, or so—whil'st you tear it away in Town, and live like Man and Wife with your Jilt, and are every day seen in the Glass Coach, whil'st your own natural Lady is hardly worth the hire of a Hack.

As anyone who has ridden in a taxi can attest, hired horses, coaches, and cars are not always in the best condition. Continual use and mistreatment ages them before their time. So, it is only natural that hackney and hackneyed would come to mean old, tired, worn out. This adjectival sense dates to at least 1590 when it appears in a work by Richard Harvey, an astrologer and theologian known for his harsh critiques of those he disagreed with:

He is a boone companion for the nonce, a secrete fosterer of illegitimate corner conceptions, a graue orator for ruffianly purposes, a busie bookeman to helpe the sworde, a rebuker of play, and yet making a play of himselfe and all thinges, a rauening woolfe in sheepes wool, a bloudy massacrer and cutthroate in iesters apparrell, a poste vpon hackney sillogismes to haue silly ones geue him the way.

That’s how what was once an exurb of London became associated with trite and tired language.

Discuss this post

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* For those unfamiliar with the geography, the City of London or the City is the immediate environs around St. Paul’s Cathedral. Cities were once defined as the parish around a cathedral. The City of London is associated with St. Paul’s, the City of Westminster with Westminster Abbey, etc. What we today call London is much larger.

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008, s.v. hakeney.

Behn, Aphra. The Town-Fopp (1676). London: T.N. for James Magnes and Richard Bentley, 1677, 8. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Harvey, Richard. A Theologicall Discourse of the Lamb of God. London: John Windet for W. Ponsonby, 1590, 119. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Herzman, Ronald B., Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds. “Bevis of Hampton.” Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997,  lines 1251–62.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman (C Text, 2008). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool U Press, 2014, 75, lines 2.178–83 (3.175–80 in Skeat’s edition).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hakenei(e, n.

Mills, A.D. A Dictionary of English Place-Names. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991, 152.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. hackney, n. and adj., hack, n.2.

Woolgar, C.M. Household Accounts from Medieval England, vol. 1 of 2. Records of Social and Economic History, New Series 17. Oxford: Oxford UP for the British Academy, 1992, 166. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Nilfanion, 2016. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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.

Discuss this post

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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.