hawk a loogie

18 December 2020

To hawk a loogie is a slang phrase meaning to expectorate a glob of phlegm from the back of the throat. It comes in many variants. Hawk is often hock or hang, and loogie can be looey, louie, or lunger. The phrase is the coming together of two words, one quite old and the other rather new.

The old one is hawk or hock. It’s probably echoic in origin and dates to the late sixteenth century. From Richard Mulcaster’s 1581 treatise on education, Positions, which also contains medical advice relevant to bringing up young boys:

Of all these diuersities in walking the moderate is most profitable, which alone of all, that I rekened, hath no point either of to much, or of to litle, and yet it is both much, and strayning, which be the two properties of an healthfull walke. It is good for the head, the eyes, the throte, the chest, when they be out of frame: so the partie spit not blood. For distilling from the head, for difficultie of breath, for a moyste and and pained stomacke, wherin the nurriture either groweth bitter or corrupteth: for the iaundise, costisnesse, fleeting of the meat in the stomacke, stopping of the vrine, ache of the hippes, and generally for all such, as either neede to prouoke any superfluitie from the vpper partes downward, or to send that packing, which is already in waye to depart. Now to the contrarie it is naught for agues, bycause it encreaseth heat, and so conseque[n]tly the disease: for the falling euill, for hauking vp of blood: and in the time when one is making water.

Loogie is of more recent vintage, dating to the latter half of the twentieth century, at least in writing. It appears in Carlo Curti’s 1967 biography of movie mogul Spyros Skouros, Skouras: King of Fox Studios:

“Out kid!” he ordered as one of his bodyguards put me in an armlock. I spit a lugey on him and he slapped my face.

The phrase is recorded in student slang in the journal Current Slang from 1970:

Hang a louie, v. To spit on someone.—College students, both sexes, Minnesota.

And another example is found in Julian Moynahan’s 1979 novel Where the Land and Water Meet:

In the old neighborhood, by Raymond Street Park, to cough up and expectorate heavy phlegm from the back of the throat was to “hawk a lunger.” When you did it, the remark to make was “Go pick the bones out of that one!”

Not a very pleasant image.

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Sources:

Moynahan, Julian. Where the Land and Water Meet. New York: Morrow, 1979, 276. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mulcaster, Richard. Positions. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1581, 83. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hawk, v.3; third edition, March 2017, s.v. loogie, n.

hat trick

17 December 2020

A cricket scene: Shaun Pollock, South Africa, bowls to batsman Michael Hussey, Australia, 27 December 2005; Pollock had one-upped a hat trick in 1996 by taking four wickets in four successive balls

North Americans are probably most familiar with hat trick from ice hockey, the name for the feat where one player scores three goals in a single game. It’s a seemingly nonsensical name, and its origins are not in hockey but in stage magic before moving into the world of sports with its use in cricket.

Hat trick is the name given to any of a variety of stage magic tricks involving a hat, perhaps most famously that of pulling a rabbit out of one. The term hat trick first appears in the United States in the Boston Morning Post of 26 February 1840:

That Master Young, at the N. E. Museum, does his tricks with remarkable ingenuity—what he calls “the hat trick” is the cleverest thing in the legerdemain line we have witnessed for many a year.

The term quickly crossed the Atlantic and appears in newspaper accounts of stage magic shows in both Britain and North America throughout the 1840s and 50s.

Then in a cricket match between the All England Eleven and the Twenty-Two of Hallam and Staveley, played at Hyde Park, Sheffield, 6–9 September 1858, bowler H. H. Stephenson knocked over three wickets with three successive balls. In celebration of this feat, his team awarded him with a new hat. The incident is recorded in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle of 12 September 1858:

The next four wickets fell to H. Stephenson without troubling the scorers; he took three wickets in three successive balls, entitling himself to a new hat, which was presented to him by the Eleven.

At some point, someone dubbed Stephenson’s feat a hat trick, a play on words combining the sense of an amazing bit of magic with Stephenson’s prize of a hat. But the sporting sense of hat trick isn’t recorded in print until 23 June 1865, when it appears in the Chelmsford Chronicle:

When the fourth wicket went down for 60 the excitement was intense. Grays, however, had yet a man equal for the occasion, and Mr. Biddell going on at W. Sackett’s end, with his second ball bowled the Romford leviathan, Mr. Beauchamp, and afterwards performed the hat trick by getting three wickets in the over, Mead being bowled for 0 and Mundy and Lawrence caught by long stop and slip respectively.

The phrase moved into other sports starting with horse racing in 1893. From the London Evening News of 14 September 1893:

“Morny” Cannon was going strong and well at Warwick yesterday, and did the hat trick by riding three winners in as many mounts.

And from there it moved into other sports, including eventually hockey. Exactly what needs to be done to achieve a hat trick varies with the sport, but it is always a set of three.

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Sources:

Boston Morning Post, 26 February 1840, 2. NewspaperArchive.

“Cricket.” Supplement to the Chelmsford Chronicle, 23 June 1865, 1. Gale News Vault.

“Cricketer’s Register.” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (London), 12 September 1858, 3. Gale News Vault.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2017, s.v. hat trick, n.

Photo credit: Prescott Pym, 27 December 2005, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

vaccine

An 1802 cartoon portraying a physician (perhaps Edward Jenner or George Pearson) inoculating patients with the cowpox virus and having them sprout bovine parts from the their bodies, showing that anti-vaccination hysteria is nothing new

16 December 2020

The word vaccine comes to us from the Latin vacca, meaning cow. That may seem a bit odd until one considers the history of this particular aspect of medical science. Smallpox is caused by Orthopoxvirus variola, and its cousin in the Orthopoxvirus genus causes cowpox, a disease that is far less virulent in humans. In the late eighteenth century, people began to observe that those who had been infected with cowpox seemed to be immune to smallpox.

Acting on this observation, English physician Edward Jenner began experiments to inoculate people with the cowpox virus and discovered that this was an effective preventative for smallpox. Jenner dubbed the causative agent for cowpox variolae vaccinae (pox of the cow) and used the adjective vaccine to refer to things associated with cowpox. From a 1799 discussion by Jenner of his discovery:

From communications, with which I have been favoured from Dr. Pearson, who has occasionally reported to me the result of his private practice with the vaccine virus in London, and from Dr. Woodville, who has also favoured me with an account of his more extensive inoculation with the same virus at the Small Pox Hospital, it appears that many of their patients have been affected with eruptions, and that these eruptions have maturated in a manner very similar to the variolous.

Jenner’s use of virus here refers to the pus from a cowpox pustule, which is what he used to inoculate his subjects, as what we today call viruses would not be discovered for another century. In Latin, virus means venom and can refer to any toxic substance.

The noun vaccination to denote inoculation with cowpox appears in the title of an 1800 paper by physician Richard Dunning: “Some Observations on Vaccination, or the Inoculated Cow-Pox.”

Later in the nineteenth century vaccine began to be used as a noun and in reference to inoculations for diseases other than smallpox/cowpox. For instance, here is a 1 April 1886 article in the anti-vivisection journal The Zoophilist in reference to Louis Pasteur’s vaccine for rabies, or as it was known then, hydrophobia:

On the 6th of July last, M. Pasteur performed his first inoculation on a human being with the so-called vaccine of hydrophobia. Joseph Meister, his first subject, had been bitten two days before by a dog supposed to be mad.

Curiously, over the centuries since Jenner first began to inoculate people against smallpox, the virus in the smallpox vaccine mutated, and while it has remained an effective prophylaxis for smallpox, it is no longer the causative agent for cowpox. As a result, the virus in the vaccine kept the name Orthopoxvirus vaccinia, while the name of the virus that causes cowpox is now Orthopoxvirus cowpox virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared in May 1980 that smallpox, Orthopoxvirus variola, had been eradicated, but we continue to use vaccines for any number of diseases,

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Sources:

Jenner, Edward. Further Observations on the Variolae Vaccinae or Cow Pox. London: Sampson Low, 1799, 56. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. vaccine, adj., vaccine, n., vaccination, n.

“The Pasteur Craze.” The Zoophilist, 5.12, 1 April 1886. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: James Gillray, 1802, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-3147.

harlot

15 December 2020

Harlot is a term of abuse, now rather old-fashioned, for a woman. It means prostitute, promiscuous woman, slut. But originally, the word referred to men. It comes from the Anglo-Norman harlot. The harl- root is of uncertain origin, but it is probably related to harlequin. The -ot is a no-longer-productive suffix forming a diminutive of a noun.

The earliest English sense of harlot is a vagabond or beggar. The earliest extant appearance is in the text known as Ancrene Riwle, a handbook for anchoresses, that is female hermits. It was written before 1200 C.E. and survives in a number of copies. A passage in a manuscript which was copied c. 1230 reads:

Scheome ich cleopie eauer her. beon itald unwurð. & beggin as an hearlot gef neod is here liueneð

(I call it shameful to be always judged contemptible and begging, as a harlot, if need be, for one’s sustenance.)

Over the next century or so, harlot also acquired the sense of a lecher or libertine. From the poem Of Arthour and of Merlin, probably written before 1300, and appearing in the Auchinleck manuscript, which was copied c. 1330:

Hir moder was ded acurssedliche
And hir fader starf reuliche
And hir broþer yslawe also
And hir soster quic doluen þo
Hir oþer soster hore strong
Þat al harlotes ȝede among.

(Her mother was damnably dead
And her father died pitiably
And her brother was also killed
And her sister was then buried alive
Her other sister a great whore
That all the harlots waxed poetic about.)

Also over time, the word became associated with entertainers, perhaps because such entertainers often solicited payment like present-day street performers do—or perhaps because of the harl- root the association was there all along; the medieval record is full of holes. The earliest version, the A-text of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, written c. 1376, uses harlot to mean minstrel or entertainer:

Holde wiþ none harlotis ne here nouȝt here talis,
And nameliche at mete suche men eschew[e],
For it arn þe deuelis disours I do þe to undirstonde.

(Associate with no harlots, nor hear their tales
And especially eschew such men at meals,
For they are the devil’s minstrels I want you to understand.)

And by the late fifteenth century, harlot could be used to refer to both male and female entertainers. The 1483 Catholicon anglicum, an English–Latin glossary contains this entry:

an Harlott; balatro (histrio A.) rusticus, gerro, mima (palpo A.) ioculator, -trix, pantomima, parasitaster, histrix, nugator, scurrulus

(a Harlot: fool (actor), peasant, buffoon, actor in pantomime (flatterer), jester, female jester, female jester, actress in pantomime, parasite, actress, storyteller, clown

The sense of a prostitute appears at about the same. From an anonymous translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, translated before 1425:

Wherefore the harlottes at Rome were callede nonariæ, for hit was not lawefulle to theyme to passe theire places, leste they schoulde lette yonge men from the commune vtilite.

(Why were the harlots of Rome called nuns? Because it was not lawful for them to leave their quarters, lest they should let the young men of the community make use of them.)

Harlots translates meretrices (prostitutes) in Higden’s Latin.

The male senses of harlot fall out of use by the seventeenth century, leaving only the sense of a prostitute or licentious woman.

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Sources:

Catholicon anglicum. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 75. London: N. Trübner and Co., 1881, 175. London, British Library, MS Additional 15562. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman: The A-Version, Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman and Do-Well. George Kane, ed. London: Athlone Press, 1960, lines 7.47–49, 318. Trinity College MS R.3.14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Macrae-Gibson, O. D., ed. Of Arthour and of Merlin, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society, 268. London: Oxford UP, 1973, lines 787–92, 61. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v. harlot, n.

Polychronican Ranulphi Higden monachi cestrensis, vol 1 of 9. Churchill Babington, ed. London: Longman et al., 1865, 249. London, British Library, Harley 2261. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tolkien, J. R. R., ed. Ancrene Wisse: the English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Early English Text Society, 249, 182. London: Oxford UP, 1962. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402. HathTrust Digital Archive.

titmouse

A tufted titmouse, Baeolophus bicolor, with blue-gray, orange, and white coloring, perched on a branch with snow on its beak

14 December 2020

A titmouse is a kind of small songbird of the family Paridae, with a variety of genera and species that range throughout the northern hemisphere and Sub-Saharan Africa. The name is of interest here because it is an excellent example of how superficial resemblances can lead one astray when trying to determine a word’s origins, for neither the bird nor the word have anything to do with teats or with mice.

The word first appears in the early fourteenth century in Le Traité de Walter de Bibbesworth sur la Langue Française (Walter of Bibbeworth’s Treatise on the French Language), which is not so much a treatise as it is a poem. The English words are interlinear glosses of the Anglo-Norman French:

                         titomoze
Uncore avez le musenge,
                       thoursekes
Ki les haies u boys renge,
                            ther gurdel
Delacez, valet, toust ta renge,
Si renger volez le musenge.

(Yet, you have the titmouse
That ranges among the hedges and woods,
Hastily untie your sword-belt, boy,
If you want to catch the titmouse.)

Titmouse is a compound of two roots. The origin of tit- here is likely an echoic coinage after the bird’s song or chirping. At about the same time that titomoze appears in Walter of Bibbesworth’s poem we see hints of the verb to tittle, meaning to whisper or spread gossip. I say hints because we don’t have attestation of verb itself until a bit later. But from 1275 we have a record of the surnames Richard le Titteler, Symon le Titteler, and Symon le Tuteler.

And we see tittler, meaning one who spreads gossip, in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the B-text of which was written c. 1380:

Enuye herfore    hated conscience
And freres to philosofye    he fonde hem to scole
The while coveytise and vnkyndenesse    conscience assailled
In vnite holycherche    conscience helde hym
And made pees porter    to pynne þe ȝates
Of alle taletellers    and tyterers [a]n ydel
Ypocrisye and he    an hard saut þei made
Ypocrisey atte ȝate    hard gan fiȝte
And wounded wel wykkedly    many [a] wise techer
Þat with conscience acorded    and cardinale vertues

(Envy, therefore, hated Conscience
And brother to Philosophy he put him to scole
While Covetousness and Unkindness assailed Conscience
In solidarity Holy Church supported Conscience
And made Peace porter to fasten the gates
From all tale tellers and titterers in vain
Hypocrisy and they, they made a hard assault
Hypocrisy at the gate made a hard fight
And cruelly severely wounded many a wise teacher
Who agreed with Conscience and cardinal virtues.)

The verb to tittle is finally attested to in the play Mankind, which dates to 1465–70. The play features a demon named Titivillus whose mission to take down the names of those who whisper and gossip or mumble and mispronounce the Latin during mass. At one point in the play, Titivillus induces the title character Mankind to leave off his prayer and answer the call of nature by tittling in his ear:

I promise yow I have no lede on my helys.
I am here ageyn to make þis felow yrke.
Qwyst! pesse! I xall go to hys ere and tittle þerin.
A schorte preyer thyrlyth Hewyn: of þi preyere blyn.
Aryse and avent þe[e], nature commpellys!

(I promise you I have no lead in my heels.
I am here again to make this fellow weary.
Quiet! Hush! I shall go to his ear and tittle therein:
“A short prayer pierces Heaven: of your prayer, cease.
Arise and relieve yourself, nature calls!”)

An alternative explanation that is often offered is that tit here refers to something of small size. And tit has been used in English to mean a small horse or a small person, and the Icelandic tittur means a runt and tita the tip of a horn, but these are all later developments, sixteenth century or later.

It is also tempting to relate titmouse to the words petit or petite. If one goes by the modern spelling, these might seem to be good candidates, but etymology is about pronunciation, not spelling, and these suggestions are essentially phonologically impossible. To come from petit would require the dropping of the stressed syllable and the addition of a final /t/, neither one of which is likely, and to have both occur in the same word is almost unthinkable. Petite, with the shift in stress and the final /t/, dodges these objections, but this word is a modern borrowing from French, centuries after titmouse is recorded. Plus, there is nothing in record resembling petitmouse.

The second element of titmouse is older. It comes from the Old English masæ, the name for the bird. It appears three times in the Old English Corpus, all of them Old English–Latin glossaries, in which masæ glosses the Latin word for the bird, parula.

The Old English word comes from a common Germanic root that meant the songbird. Cognates in present-day languages are the German Meise, Danish mejsen, Dutch mees, Norwegian meis, Swedish mes, as well as the French mésange. The French word comes out of the Norman dialect, musenge (seen above). Norman French was heavily influenced by Old Norse because the region was heavily settled by Danes. Norman, after all, is just a variation on Norseman.

The shift of masæ or moze to mouse is a result of the Great Vowel Shift in the sixteenth century. In this case the vowel /u:/ changed to /aʊ/. And since it was pronounced the same as mouse, the spelling of titmouse soon followed.

So, a titmouse is a chirping songbird. It makes perfect sense once you know the history.

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Sources:

Burrow, John A. and Thorlac Turville–Petre. Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype. Raleigh, North Carolina: Seenet, 2018, lines 20.295–304, 371–72.

Hessels, J.H., ed. An Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890, 89. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Mankind.” Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Greg Walker, ed. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000, lines 556–61, 271.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. tit-mose, n., titiller, n.

Owen, Annie, ed. Le Traité de Walter de Bibbesworth sur la Langue Française (Walter of Bibbeworth’s Treatise on the French Language). Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977, lines 759–62, 114. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Cambridge, University Library Gg.1.1).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, s.v. titmouse, n., tittler, n.1; January 2018, s.v. tit, n.4; December 2002, s.v. mose, n.

Pheifer, J.D., ed. Old English Glosses in the Épinal–Erfurt Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 43. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Reaney, P.H. and R.M. Wilson, eds. A Dictionary of British Surnames, second edition with corrections and additions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, 350. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Jocelyn Anderson, 17 December 2016, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.