lickspittle

January 10, 2021

10 January 2021

Lickspittle is an epithet that you don’t hear all that often, although given the large number of them in politics today, perhaps one should hear it more often. The OED classifies it in Frequency Band 3, meaning that it appears less than once per ten million words. (Words with similar frequencies are prelapsarian, agglutinative, dirt-cheap, and badass.) I had thought it might be more frequent in British usage than North American, but it is slightly more frequent on the right side of the pond.

Its etymology is simple, a compound of lick, v. + spittle n., and the metaphor underlying the word is similarly straightforward. A lickspittle is a sycophant or toady, one who figuratively laps up the saliva of their master.

The metaphor appears by 1586 in a commentary on the biblical book of Haggai by John James Gryneus:

Although the former sort of these men haue their fauourers and followers, no lesse then th'other (for there were not wanting in times past, flatterers which did licke the spittle of Dyonisius the tyraunte, and said that it was sweeter then the sweete wine).

But the word itself isn’t recorded until the middle of the eighteenth century. It appears as a name of a character, the Reverend Doctor Lick-Spittle, in the 1755 anonymous play The Misrepresentor Represented. (The play may be older. The publication date is 1755, but the subtitle says, “not performed in this Kingdom since the Year 1715.” Whether or not the subtitle is true is anyone’s guess.)

It appears again as a name in John Carteret Pilkington’s 1760 picaresque autobiography, although in this case the name is a factitious nickname. In an incident rendered in the book as if it were a stage play, Pilkington has a woman label an obsequious man “Timothy Lickspittle,” upon which another woman gives the man’s real name:

KITTY. Another freeman, I warrant! he wants to inspect the pantry.—Duke (reads) and it may be in your capacity, if it is your inclination, to save from ruin your most obsequious, most devoted, most obliged, most obedient, most—Oh! Lard! I can remember no more, Timothy Lickspittle.
Lady BAB. Surely you wrongs him, my Lord Duke! let me see, no, faith, 'tis Ricard Gapple, if I can reade.

And by 1766 we see the word being used directly. From another satirical piece that appeared in the London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer of May of that year:

Q. How do officers rise?
A. By merit
Q. How many different kinds of merit are there?
A. Four: the first consists in having a pretty large sum at command; the second, in being son to a nobleman in place; the third in marrying the b——d or wh——e of a G——l O——r, and the last in being a talebearer and lickspittle to the C——l of the r——t one belongs to.

The expurgated words are bastard, whore, General Officer, Colonel, and regiment.

And it is recorded in Francis Grose’s 1796 edition of his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

LICKSPITTLE. A parasite, or talebearer.

Use of lickspittle became more frequent in the nineteenth century, moving out of satire and slang to general discourse. Sadly, it seems to have declined in frequency in the latter half of the twentieth. It is a very useful and often apt word.

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Sources:

“A Constitutional and Political English Catechism. Necessary for All Families.” London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, vol. 35, May 1766, 266. HathiTrustDigital Archive.

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), January 2021.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, third edition. London: Hooper and Wigstead, 1796.

Gryneus, John James. Haggeus, the Prophet. London: John Wolfe for John Harrison, 1586, C2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Misrepresentor Represented. Dublin, 1755. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. lick-spittle, n.

Pilkington, John Carteret. The Real Story of John Carteret Pilkington. London: 1760, 290. HathiTrustDigital Archive.

honeymoon

January 8, 2021

8 January 2021

As the word is used today, a honeymoon is a vacation taken by a newly married couple. The etymology is rather straightforward: honey (i.e., something sweet) + moon (brief period of time). It is also used figuratively to mean a period of good relations or enthusiasm at the beginning of an endeavor, often a political one. But it wasn’t always like this. Initially the word was used with an emphasis on the brevity of the period, which would inevitably wane, just like the moon.

The earliest known use of the term is in a 1546 dialogue by poet and playwright John Heywood, in which he incorporates a large number of aphorisms and clichés, including honeymoon:

Who, the daie of weddyng and after, a while,
Could not loke eche on other, but they must smile.
As a whelpe for wantonnes in and out whipps,
So plaied these tweyne, as mery as thre chipps.
Þe there was god (quoth he) whan all is doone.
Abyde (quoth I) it was yet but hony moone.
The blacke oxe had not trode on his nor her foote.
But er this branche of blys coulde reache any roote,
The floures so faded, that in fiftene weekes,
A man myght espie the chaunge in the cheekes,
Both of this pore wretch, & his wife this pore wenche.
Their faces told toies, þ[at] Totnam was turnd frenche
And all their light laughyng turnd and translated
Into sad syghyng, all myrth was amated.

The emphasis on waning and souring of the couple’s love is repeated in the word’s first appearance in a dictionary, John Higgins’s 1572 revision of Richard Huloet’s dictionary:

Hony moone, a terme prouerbially applied to such as be newe maried, whiche will not fall out at the firste, but th'one loueth the other at the beginning exceadingly, the likelyhode of their exceading loue, appearing to aswage, which time the vulgare people call the hony moone. Aphrodisia, Feriae hymenaeae.

And the figurative use of the term appears by 1579 in a tract about diplomatic relations between England and France by pamphleteer John Stubbes:

It might be honiemoone awhile with them but aftervvard french would be no deinty dish, and these seely interpreters vvere happye if they might quietly stand without the dore.

The sense of a post-wedding vacation doesn’t appear until the end of the eighteenth century, when it appears in William Beckford’s translation of Johann Carl A. Musäus’s The Nymph of the Fountain. Although here the meaning of the word itself is literally that of the initial period of wedded bliss, only in a context of and perhaps with the expectation that it would be spent on a vacation:

The new-married couple spent their honey-moon in Augspurg [sic], in mutual happiness and innocent enjoyments, like the first human pair in the garden of Eden.

Honey-moon here is translating Spieljahr in the German original, which would seem to be a play on words by Musäus, as this is not a standard meaning of the German word, which is typically used to refer to a theatrical or sports season.

Over time, honeymoon the connotation of the loving bliss being temporary has been lost—although retained in the figurative, political sense. The vacation itself, however, is still brief.

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Sources:

Heywood, John. A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1546, 1.7, sig. B4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Higgins, John. Huloets Dictionarie Newelye Corrected, Amended, Set in Order and Enlarged. London: Thomas Marshe, 1572. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Musäus, Johann Carl August. “The Nymph of the Fountain.” Popular Tales of the Germans, vol. 2 of 2. William Beckford, trans. London: J. Murray, 1791, 266. Google Books.

Musäus, Johann Karl August. Volksmährchen der Deutschen. vol. 2 of 4. Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1788, 270. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Stubbes, John. The Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf VVhereinto England Is Like to Be Swallovved by Another French Mariage. London: H. Singleton for W. Page, 1579, sig. D4r.

Photo credit: M. H. Zahner, “Spending their Honeymoon at Niagara,” late nineteenth century, New York Public Library. Public domain in the United States as a mechanical reproduction of a work that was produced before 1925.

hospital

January 7, 2021

7 January 2021

The English word hospital is a good example of the interplay between English, Latin, and French in the medieval period and how England during that period was, at least among the upper classes, a tri-lingual nation. It also shows the cultural interplay and exchange between predominately Christian Europe and the Muslim world during the medieval period. Hospital comes to us from the Latin hospitalis, a guest house or guest bedroom. As such it is related to hospitality. The word’s association with curing, or at least caring for, the sick and injured occurs rather early, but the sense of the word specifically meaning an institution dedicated to medicine and health doesn’t appear until the start of the early modern period.

We see the Latin hospitalis being used in England during the Old English period. For example, sometime prior to 796 C.E., Alcuin wrote to Eanbald, the archbishop of York:

Consideret quoque tua diligentissima in elemosinis pietas ubi xenodochia, id est hospitalia, fieri iubeas, in quibus sit cotidiana pauperum et peregrinorum susceptio, et ex nostris substantiis habeant.
(Let him consider also your most diligent piety in alms, where you have commanded there to be established waystations, i.e., hospitals, in which there should be the daily reception of paupers and pilgrims, and they should have [means/substance] from our resources.)

But while speakers of Latin knew the word, it was not borrowed into Old English, quite possibly because hosp in Old English meant disgrace or shame. Instead, Old English continued to use native words like inn and gyst-hof.

In the quotation above we see a slight expansion of the traditional meaning of the Latin hospitalis from a guest house or chamber to that of an inn or hostel that had started a century earlier in Rome. In the seventh century, Pope Gregory I had ordered one of the first and the most famous of these hospitals to be founded in Jerusalem for use by Christian pilgrims to that city. But at first it had no association with sick or injured.

In Baghdad in the ninth century, a system of bimaristans (Arabic بِيْمَارِسْتَان) began to care for lepers, eventually becoming places to care for the aged, infirm, and ill throughout the Muslim world. The quarter of Jerusalem which housed the Christian hospital would become known as the Muristan from the bimaristan located there. Pilgrims to Jerusalem would bring back knowledge of the system of bimaristans to Europe. And following the First Crusade (1096–99), in 1120 Raymond de Puy, the head of the order of Knights Hospitallers, expanded the hospital in Jerusalem that had been founded by Gregory centuries before, allowing it to care for the ill based on the Muslim model.

La vie de saint Thomas Becket (The Life of St. Thomas Becket) was penned a few years after Becket’s death, sometime before 1176. And this Anglo-Norman text uses the word hospital to refer to the leprosarium that had been founded c. 1084 by Lanfranc, the archbishop of Canterbury. This leprosarium was in Hambledown, Kent, near Canterbury (now part of that city). Following the murder of Becket, King Henry II enlarged the leprosarium and expanded it to include an alms house for the poor:

Juste Cantorbire unt leprus un hospital,
U mult i ad malades, degez e plains de mal.
(Near Canterbury lepers, outcast and full of illness, have a hospital, where many there have sicknesses.)

And:

E a un hospital, bien dons liwes de la,
A herberchier les povres, li reis ne s’ublia:
Kar de rente a cel liu par au cent sols dona.
(The king did not forget to give refuge to the poor with a hospital, an easy distance from the place: for he gave one hundred shillings for the rent for this place for a year.)

England during this period was trilingual, with the aristocracy speaking both French and English, and the clergy adding Latin to the mix. So, while we don’t have English-language examples of hospital from this period, the word probably would have been familiar to those who only spoke English as well.

But we don’t see hospital appear in English for another century or so. The poem Richard Coer de Lyon, written sometime before 1300, makes reference to the hospital in Jerusalem:

The kynge of Fraunce, without wene,
Lay in the cyté of Messene,
And Kynge Rycharde without the wall,
Under the house of the Hospytall.

And shortly later, c. 1300, the life of Becket in the South English Legendary references the hospital near Canterbury:

He com aȝen þulke hous · as þis Gilberd inne was
And sein Thomas was suþþe þerinne ibore · gracious was þat cas
Þat is nou an ospital · irered of sein Thomas
(He came again to this house, as this Gilbert was within
And Saint Thomas was then brought inside, gracious was that situation,
That is now a hospital, established because of Saint Thomas.)

Still, during this period, hospitals, while they might incidentally care for lepers or those who were otherwise ill, aged, or infirm, were not dedicated to their care, remaining primarily almshouses or temporary lodgings for travelers.

It isn’t until the mid sixteenth century that we see hospital being used to refer to an institution dedicated solely to medical care. In 1546, Henry VIII re-endowed the old monastic Hospital of Saint Bartholomew in London, providing funds to provide medical care for one hundred indigent people. This is reflected in the preface to the The Ordre of the Hospital of S. Bartholomewes, published in 1552:

It is better knowen by reaporte vnto the nombre, then weyghed in effect almoste to any, that for the relief of the sore and sicke of the citie of London, It pleased the Kinges Maiestie, of famous memorie, Henry London poor and the eight (father to this our moste drad souereigne sick, lorde nowe reignyng) to erecte an hospitall in West Smithfield, for the continual relief & help of an .C. patients, sore and diseased.

That’s how a traveler’s waystation or hostel became a hospital.

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Sources:

Alcuin. “Epistola ad Enbadum archiepiscopum.” Two Alcuin Letter Books. Colin Chase, ed. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studes, 1975, 69. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2018.

Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence. La vie de saint Thomas Becket. Emmanuel Walberg, ed. Lund, Sweden: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1922, 200. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Larkin, Peter, ed. Richard Coer de Lyon. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. 2015, lines 1765–68.

Mill, Anna Jean and Charlotte D’Evelyn, eds. “St. Thomas A Becket.” The South English Legendary, vol. 2 of 2. Early English Text Society, 236. London: Oxford UP, 1956, lines 82–84, 613.

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

“Preface.” The Ordre of the Hospital of S. Bartholomewes in West Smythfielde in London. London: R. Grafton, 1552, A.2r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Benjamin Cole, 1720, Wellcome Collection Gallery; used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Thanks to Jessica Lockhart and Suzanne Akbari for assistance in the translations. Any errors are mine alone.

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.