homecoming

January 6, 2021

6 January 2021

The term homecoming has been around for centuries, but in North America at the turn of the twentieth century, it acquired two new, more specific meanings.

The meaning of homecoming was originally quite literal, referring to a return to one’s home after a time spent away. This sense of the word dates back to the late fourteenth century. It appears in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, c. 1385:

And certes, if it nere to long to heere,
I wolde have toold yow fully the manere
How wonnen was the regne of Femenye
By Theseus and by his chivalrye;
And of the grete bataille for the nones
Bitwixen Atthenes and Amazones;
And how asseged was Ypolita,
The faire, hardy queene of Scithia;
And of the feste that was at hir weddynge,
And of the tempest at hir hoom-comynge;
But al that thyng I moot as now forbere.
(And certainly, if it were not too long to hear,
I would have told you fully the manner
In which the reign of Femininity was won
By Theseus and his chivalry;
And of the great battle at that time
Between Athens and the Amazons;
And how Hippolyta was besieged,
The fair, valiant queen of Scythia;
And of the feast that was at their wedding,
And of the tempest at her homecoming;
But all that matter I must forgo.)

And for the next five hundred years, the word remained unchanged in meaning.

But toward the end of the nineteenth century, homecoming began to be used for a specific type of return, that of a sports team to its home playing field after a series of games on the road. It’s used this way in the Boston Evening Journal of 22 July 1890, recording a loss in baseball’s National League of the Buffalo Bisons to the New York Giants the day before:

The Bisons signalized their home coming to-day by dropping a game to the Giants which should have been theirs. The hitting of Conner was the feature.

A little more than a decade later, we see homecoming refer to an annual celebration in which alumni return to their university to watch sporting events, catch up with old friends, and hopefully donate money to the institution. In August 1902, an article in Outlook magazine extolling Princeton University makes mention of an alumni homecoming, but it seems to be using it in the general sense of a return, not in the sense of planned event:

The usual disillusionment of going back to an old haunt and finding it small or ugly, and the glamour gone, never happens at Princeton. It is one of the few places that has kept pace with our dreams. The good old face is always there, but, oh! the new garments and the gorgeous ornament with which she decks herself for our homecoming!

And just a month before, in July 1902, there is mention of a homecoming event, but it is for a Memphis, Tennessee medical association, not a university:

The honor of addressing this body as its presiding officer is one which I esteem most highly and acknowledge with rare pleasure. Residing in the city which is the home of the West Tennessee Medical and Surgical Association, I take great pride in adding to the words of welcome of Mr. T. H. Arnold on behalf of the other citizens, the cordial greeting of the physicians of Jackson to the Association collectively and individually, at its annual homecoming.

The next year, we see a specific reference to a university homecoming celebration, this time at Harvard. From the 24 June 1903 issue of the Boston Journal:

The second day of the annual homecoming of Harvard men ended last night with a score of class reunions at the hotels and clubs.

The three senses, that of a general return, a sports home stand after a time on the road, and a university alumni gathering all remain in use today.

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Sources:

“Address.” Memphis Medical Monthly, 22.7, July 1902, 337. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Bridges, Robert. “Princeton University: The Kind of Men Who Made It.” Outlook, 2 August 1902, 834. ProQuest.

“The Brotherhood.” Boston Evening Journal, 22 July 1890, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Knight’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1.875–85. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website, 2020.

“Harvard Grads Renew Their College Days.” Boston Journal, 24 June 1903, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. homecoming, n.

Photo Credit: Albert Herring, Tulane University Public Relations, 22 October 2011, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Hogan's goat

January 5, 2021

5 January 2021

The phrase like Hogan’s goat refers to something that is faulty, messed up, or stinks like a goat. The phrase is a reference to R.F. Outcault’s seminal newspaper comic Hogan’s Alley, which debuted in 1895. The title of the strip changed to The Yellow Kid the following year. (See also Yellow Journalism https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/yellow-journalism). Among its characters, the comic featured a goat that was always butting things and otherwise causing trouble.

The comic was enormously popular, as seen by this description of social event in Butte Montana on 19 June 1899:

About 500 people assembled in Hibernia hall at Centerville last Monday evening to enjoy themselves in “Hogan’s Alley.” They had their “habits on,” and a nicer time was never seen in Butte. The parade started through the alley with “Hogan, Hogan’s goat, the Yellow Kid and Liz” in the lead, and every other character known in the alley behind them.

Hogan’s goat quickly developed into a slang term for someone who interferes with another’s affairs or otherwise “butts in,” as seen in this pair of uses from 1905. From Frank Hutchison’s humor book The Philosophy of Johnnie the Gent:

“Well we’re over in Casey's the other night—me an' the Wise Cracker an' the Handshaker. Say, where did that Mr. Handshaker ever get the idea that he was a class A rough house performer, hey?
“We was tippin' in the brew pretty lively when in blows 'bout half a dozen o' them long haired college kids, near every one o' them big enough to sic onto Jeffries, an all 'em feelin' pretty good an’ makin' plenty o' noise. You know they're pretty handy at that. Well, the original Hogan's goat, Mr. Wise Crackin' Kid, has to butt in wit’ them. They get to talkin' football, an' the Wise Cracker drags over the Handshaker.

And the Kentucky newspaper the Lexington Herald of 19 September 1905 details this courtroom exchange between two lawyers:

There was a series of hot tilts between Attorneys Healy and Chas. Wilby, in one of which Healy declared:
“You’re like Hogan’s goat, Mr. Wilby; you’re always butting in.”
“That’s what I’m here for—to butt in,” retorted Wilby.

Eventually, Hogan’s goat came to stand for anything that was obnoxious, bad, or failed. This article from the Washington Post of 9 April 1940 compares aging racehorses with Hogan’s goat:

The fans will love it. They don’t know a thoroughbred from Hogan’s goat. They think Ormondale was the name of an Egyptian king and that Sir Barton is a Scotch whisky. All they want to do is put up two dollars and get to one or better. They wouldn’t care if they were watching camels?”

And this one from the Miami Daily News of 15 February 1953 laments the state of affairs in the Florida-International (F-I) baseball league:

The whole batch has been shaken from losses; there is a slight chance, however, that the chiefs realize their indians are liable to die of malnutrition if some of their own butt-headed policies aren’t changed to fit circumstances.
Otherwise, the F-I will be deader than Hogan’s goat before July 1.

Hogan’s goat probably hit its peak in 1965 when William Alfred’s play of that name premiered in New York, the original cast of which featured the young Faye Dunaway. The play ran for two years. But since then, the term has faded from use, and while you can still find occasional current uses of it, it mainly appears when one is reading material from early in the twentieth century.

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Sources:

Hutchison, Frank. The Philosophy of Johnnie the Gent. Chicago: M. A. Donahue & Company, 1905, 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. Hogan’s goat, n.

“In Society.” Butte Weekly Miner (Montana), 22 June 1899, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Internet Off-Broadway Database. The Lucille Lortel Foundation. 2020.

McLemore, Morris. “Gallant Rust Tests Golf.” Miami Daily News, 15 February 1953, 1-D. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Mrs. Madden.” Lexington Herald (Kentucky), 19 September 1905, 6.

Phillips, H. I., “The Once Over.” Washington Post, 9 April 1940, 11. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Hobson's choice

December 31, 2020

1629 portrait of Thomas Hobson, a man in early seventeenth-century dress

31 December 2020

Hobson’s choice is the doctrine of take it or leave it, a situation where one is given the choice between what is being proffered or nothing at all. The phrase dates to at least 1659, during which year it appears multiple times. One example is from a pamphlet on politics titled The Grand Concernments of England Ensured:

It is frivolous to think that the 14 in England, like little Babies, would be pleased with this Rattle, of Choosing; when it is evident it must be Hobsons choice, this or none; and as I have been cheated my self when a Boy, and thought it priviledge enough to choose, the Wags have cut the greatest piece of an Apple, and offered me the Remainder, and bid me take that or choose.

This instance tells us what Hobson’s choice is, but it doesn’t give a clue as to who Hobson was or why the choice is named for him. Fortunately, he was, in his day, a rather well-known person, at least among the educated elite of England. Thomas Hobson (c. 1544–1631) was a Cambridge innkeeper who also ran the post between Cambridge and London. When his horses weren’t being used for mail runs, he rented them to students, and as a result, pretty much every student who came through Cambridge during his lifetime had dealings with him. And upon his death, several students, including John Milton, wrote jocular poems as epitaphs for him. Milton’s two poems about him, “On the University Carrier” and “Another on the Same,” were published in 1640.

The choice comes into the picture because of Hobson’s method for renting his horses to students. His students, being young, preferred the fastest horses, and the horses, being rentals, were not treated particularly well by them. To avoid exhausting and ruining his best horses, Hobson instituted a rotation system, forcing the students to take the next horse in line or go without. Hobson’s system is recounted in a “letter” in the Spectator written by a Hezekiah Thrift, an obvious pseudonym, probably for either Joseph Addison or Richard Steele, the Spectator’s editors:

I shall conclude this discourse with an explanation of a proverb, which by vulgar error is taken and used when a man is reduced to an extremity, whereas the propriety of the maxim is to use it when you would say there is plenty, but you must make such a choice as not to hurt another who is to come after you.
Mr. Tobias Hobson, from whom we have the expression, was a very honourable man, for I shall ever call the man so who gets an estate honestly. Mr. Tobias Hobson was a carrier; and, being a man of great abilities and invention, and one that saw where there might good profit arise, though the duller men overlooked it, this ingenious man was the first in this island who let out hackney-horses. He lived in Cambridge; and, observing that the scholars rid hard, his manner was to keep a large stable of horses, with boots, bridles, and whips, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow, as they have done since the death of this worthy man. I say, Mr. Hobson kept a stable of forty good cattle always ready and fit for travelling; but, when a man came for a horse, he was led into the stable, where there was great choice; but he obliged him to take the horse which stood next to the stable-door; so that every customer was alike well served according to his chance, and every horse ridden with the same justice; from whence it became a proverb, when what ought to be your election was forced upon you, to say, “Hobson's choice.”

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Sources:

The Grand Concernments of England Ensured. London: 1659, 45. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Luxon, Thomas H. “On the University Carrier.” The John Milton Reading Room. Dartmouth College, 2020.

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

The Spectator, 509, 14 October 1712. In A. Chalmers, The Spectator, vol. 7 of 8. New York: 1883, 206–07. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image Source: National Portrait Gallery, London. Public domain in the United States as a mechanical reproduction of a work of art that was produced before 1925.

hero

December 30, 2020

Clip from the 1970 anti-war, comedy Kelly's Heroes in which Donald Sutherland explains to Don Rickles what is and what isn't a hero (13 sec)

30 December 2020 [edited 31 December]

In classical mythology, a hero is a person with preternatural courage and abilities, often the child of a god, and who achieves semi-divine status. In the real world, a hero is an exceptionally courageous or noble person or a great warrior. And a hero can also be a large sandwich. The connection between the first two definitions is rather obvious, but how did the third come to be?

Hero comes into English from the Latin heros, which in turn is from the Greek ἥρως.

Digression: ἥρως (hero) should not be confused with ἔρως (eros, sexual love). The difference between the eta and an epsilon is a big one, and it has been confused in the past. In the eleventh century, the physician Constantinus Africanus translated a number of medical texts from Arabic into Latin. One of the diseases he wrote about was heros morbo, literally meaning lovesickness. But unlike the modern concept of lovesickness, the medieval disease was thought to be fatal, resulting in the unrequited lover pining away, sickening, and eventually dying if the love was not consummated. The Arabic word that Constantinus was translating was ^cishq (passionate love). And in his coinage, he used the Greek ἔρως (eros, sexual love) as his root, and he also coined the word eriosus (sufferer of lovesickness). But his Latin transcription of heros was later confused with the Latin word hero (noble man), and the unfamiliar eriosus was given as heroicus (heroic) in later manuscripts. Thus, lovesickness was transformed into heroic sickness, associated with chivalric ideals, and became a staple of medieval romances, where the hero often suffers bodily harm from not having his love returned.

Back to the main subject: the classical sense of hero makes its English appearance by 1534, when it appears in a translation of Erasmus’s A Plain and Godly Exposition or Declaration of the Common Creed:

I passe ouer here the fayned tales of poetes / by which the gentyles or hethen people were perswadyd and brought in beleffe / that of goddes & women / and of goddesses and men / were gendred & brought forth heroes.

The sense of a great and brave warrior is recorded in English a few years earlier in Gavin Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into Scottish dialect. A pre-1522 manuscript (which I don’t have access to) spells it herys. The passage from Book 9 of the poem, as printed in a 1553 edition reads:

And na les murnyng, haid thay in that stede
For rhamnites fund hedeles, pale and dede
To giddir, with sa mony Capitanis
And grete heros, sa wrechitlie as slane is
Sirranus ȝoung, and the gentill Numa
(And no less mourning had they in that place
For Rhamnes found headless, pale and dead,
Together with so many captains
And great heroes, so wretchedly slain,
Serranus the young and gentle Numa.)

Douglas’s use of hero here is something of a cross between the classical and the modern sense, as he is referring to ordinary men—and not someone like Aeneas himself, who was a son of Venus, but it is from a classical mythological source, the Aeneid. A fully modern use, albeit one that refers to the medieval period is from Barnabe Rich’s 1578 Allarme to England, which has Charlemagne referring to his soldiers as heroes:

Charles the great, when he had translated the name of the Empire to the Germanes, after the Saxons and Lombards were va[n]quished, gaue this honor to his souldiers saying: You shall be called Heroes, the companions of Kinges, & Iudges of offences.

Hero, in both classical and English use, could refer to either a man or a woman. But the feminine form heroine had been coined by 1587, when it appears in John Bridges’s A Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande for Ecclesiasticall Matters. Bridges gives a list of noble queens from antiquity, including Cordelia, daughter of Lear, and Boudica, and says of them:

Now although that these Heroines, & a great number mo. whome I refer to their diligence that list to collect the[m], were in religion to Godward al Pagans, and therefore their gouernment (in many actions) not so commendable, & in some vicious, yea, beyond the bou[n]ds of the sexe feminine: yet hindereth not this, but yt their gouernme[n]t & authority (if they vsurped if not, nor abused the same) might notwithstanding be good & lawful in the[m].

So, we have the first two senses of hero, as well as the feminine form heroine, established in the sixteenth century, but where does the sandwich get its name?

The sandwich sense of hero is an Americanism dating to the 1930s. It can be found throughout the United States, but its use is concentrated in the greater New York City area. We don’t know for sure why New Yorkers call submarine sandwiches heroes, but the most likely explanation, one that is supported by the earliest known use of this sense, is that the sandwich is so large that one must be a hero to eat it. The earliest known use of the sandwich sense is from the Brooklyn Times Union of 23 August 1936:

"A hero" does not always mean the same thing to the initiated and Tony Jordan, election district captain of the 18th A. D. Democratic Club. It is sometimes a husky man-sized sandwich.
Recipe: One half loaf of the long French bread, sliced through the middle. Spread one side profusely with juicy meat balls with Jordan sauce and fried green peppers. Clap on the top half of the bread, etc.—a hero sandwich. It takes a hero to eat one and only sissies have to cut it in half again, to go to work on it!

Tony Jordan (or Giordano) was a very successful, Brooklyn, Democratic-machine politican of the 1930s. The second generation of a local, political dynasty, his home was frequently the site of many informal gatherings where pols mixed with the citizenry and, since Ebbets Field was just a few blocks away, with the Dodgers. His use of hero, while probably not original to him, was undoubtedly a factor in establishing the term in New York City.

It is sometimes suggested that the sandwich name comes from the Greek gyros, a sandwich of pita bread, spiced meat, tomatoes, lettuce, and tzatziki sauce. But this is exceedingly unlikely, as gyros do not make their appearance in America until decades later.

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[Edit: I added the paragraph about Tony Jordan on 31 December 2020.]

Sources:

Bridges, John. A Defence of the Gouernment Established in the Church of Englande for Ecclesiasticall Matters. London: John Windet for Thomas Chard, 1587. 743. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. hero, n.

Erasmus, Desiderius. A Playne and Godly Exposition or Declaratio[n] of the Co[m]mune Crede. William Marshall, trans. London: Robert Redman, 1534, fol. 60. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. hero, n., heroine, n.

“Picked From the Throng.” Brooklyn Times Union, 23 August 1936, 7. Newspapers.com.

Popik, Barry. “Hero Sandwich.” Barrypopik.com. 11 July 2004. https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/hero_sandwich/

Rich, Barnabe. Allarme to England. London: Henrie Middleton for C. Barker, 1578, sig. F.ij. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Virgil. The XIII Bukes of Eneados of the Famose Poete Virgill. Gavin Douglas, trans. London: William Copland, 1553, 234v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Wack, Mary Frances. “The Liber de heros morbo of Johannes Afflacius and Its Implications for Medieval Love Conventions.” Speculum, 62.2, April 1987, 324–44. JSTOR.

Video credit: Hutton, Brian G., dir. Kelly’s Heroes, Troy Kennedy-Martin, writer. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1970. Fair use of a low-resolution copy to illustrate the topic under discussion.

hermetic seal

December 29, 2020

Floor mosaic of Hermes Trismegistus in the Cathedral of Siena, Italy, c. 1485

29 December 2020

A hermetic seal is an air-tight one, but why is it associated with Hermes, the Greek messenger god?

The association goes back to the beginnings of the philosophical movement of Neo-Platonism in Alexandria, Egypt in the second century C.E. In the classical world, Hermes, a god of communication, was often associated with the Egyptian god Thoth, a god of wisdom and secrecy. They were often combined in a deity labeled Hermes Trismegistus, that is Thrice-Great Hermes, and various core Neo-Platonic works were ascribed to this deity. The occult pseudoscience of alchemy, the forerunner of modern chemistry, arose out of this Neo-Platonic school.

In English, the adjective hermetic originally referred to alchemy. We see it appear in this general sense in a 1624 book about numerology, another occult practice, by William Ingpen, in which he refers to Joseph Duschesne, a.k.a. Josephus Quercetanus, a noted alchemist, as a hermetic:

There are fiue things rise among those Paracelsians, which they call as Elements; Elementa, matrices, agri, ventriculi, minerae, treated of by Quercetanus, an excellent Hermetick and Spagyrick.

(Spagyric also refers to alchemy, so Ingpen is a bit redundant here.)

But the association of seals with Hermes Trismegistus in English is even older. The phrase Hermes seal appears in a 1559 translation of Swiss naturalist Konrad Gesner’s Thesaurus Euonymi Philiatri, which gives a succinct description of how alchemists achieved an air-tight seal:

Of Hermes seal, that is, of ioyning together the mouthes of glasen vessels with a paire of hot burning tonges softlye thrusting them together, and how after they oughte to be opened againe, reade Vlstadius. cap. 20.

The phrase hermetic seal appears by 1650 in a translation of alchemist Arthur Dee’s Fasciculus chemicus. The translator was Elias Ashmole, an alchemist and antiquary whose collection formed the core of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University:

You shall make choise of a forme of the glassy Vessell round in the bottom or cucurbit, or at least ovall, the neck an hand breadth long or more, large enough, with a straight mouth, made like a Pitcher or Jugg, continued & uncutt and thick in every part, that it may resist a long, and sometimes an acute Fire: The cucurbit or Bolts head is called blind, because its eye is blinded with the Hermetick seal, lest any thing from without should enter in, or the Spirit steal out.

Hermetic seal can also be used figuratively, as seen in this 1663 sermon by Jeremy Taylor at the funeral of John Bramhall, the Anglican archbishop of Ireland:

But in the whole Christs Resurrection and ours is the Α and Ω of a Christian; that as Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to day, and the same for ever; so may we in Christ, become in the morrow of the Resurrection the same or better then yesterday in our natural life; the same body and the same soul tied together in the same essential union, with this onely difference, that not Nature but Grace and Glory with an Hermetick seal give us a new signature, whereby we shall no more be changed, but like unto Christ our head we shall become the same for ever.

Word origins are not always straightforward and obvious, but when they aren’t, there’s almost invariably some interesting historical tidbits involved.

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Sources:

Dee, Arthur. Fasciculus chemicus or Chymical Collections. James Hasolle (Elias Ashmole), trans. London: J. Flesher for Richard Mynne, 1650, 241. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Gesner, Konrad. The Treasure of Euonymus Conteyninge the Wonderfull Hid Secretes of Nature. London: John Daie, 1559, 66. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Ingpen, William. The Secrets of Numbers. London: Humphry Lowns for John Parker, 1624, 43. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hermetic, adj. and n., seal, n.2.

Taylor, Jeremy. A Sermon Preached in Christs-Church Dublin, July 16, 1663, at the Funeral of the Most Reverend Father in God, John [Bramhall], Late Lord Archbishop of Armaugh, and Primate of all Ireland, third edition, enlarged. London: J.G. for Richard Royston, 1663, 6–7. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: unknown photographer, public domain image.