hoodwink

14 January 2021

To hoodwink someone is to deceive or fool them, and the word has a rather straightforward etymology, although the meaning of wink has changed over the centuries, and that can confuse present-day speakers. Hoodwink is a compound of hood + wink, two elements with roots in Proto-Germanic and which are still very much in use today.

Hood, meaning a head covering, appears as early as c. 700 C.E. as an Old English gloss to the Latin word capitium in the Épinal Glossary. And the present-day wink comes from the Old English verb wincian, meaning to close one’s eyes. From the c. 897 Old English translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care:

Ac se þe agiemeleasað ðæt he ðence, ærðæmþe he do, se stæpð forð mid ðæm fotum, & wincað mid ðæm eagum. He gæð on ðone weg, ac he nat on hwæt he gæð, ac he wierð swiðe hræðe on fielle.

(But he who neglects to think before he acts, he steps forth with his feet and winks with his eyes. He goes on his way, but he does not know where he is going, and he very soon comes to a fall.)

Gregory’s original Latin reads oculos claudit (he closes his eyes).

The present-day sense of hood is much the same as it was in the early medieval era, but the sense of wink has changed. Wink now generally refers to the momentary closing of one eye, often in discreet acknowledgement of something. This sense first appears in the fourteenth century and gradually drove out the sense of closing both eyes so one cannot see.

The compound hoodwink appears by the mid sixteenth century. The earliest instance I’m aware of is in a 1562 religious tract, An Apologie of Priuate Masse, arguing for the legality of private celebrations of the mass, saying that old traditions should not govern modern conduct. In this particular instance, though, hoodwink is being used to denote covering women’s faces with a veil and not in the sense of blinding someone:

And will you I beseeche ye reforme al thynges to the very state of the primatiue churche now? Will you suppresse al christian kyngis which were not in the Apostels time? Wyll you alter the state now, and make all thinges to be common? Wyll you disgrace all preachers that woorke not miracles? Wyl you inforce women to hoodwinke them selues in the churche? will you rayle against bisshoppes that kéepe any temporalties?

And about fifty years later, the metaphorical sense of to deceive someone appears. From John Healey’s 1610 translation of Augustine’s City of God:

For the riuer Iordan parted, when Iosuah lead the people ouer it, and when Heliah passed it, as likewise when his follower Heliseus deuided it with Heliah his cloake, and the sunne as wee said before went back in the time of Hezechiah. But Varro doth not say that any one desired this change of Venus. Let not the faithlesse therefore hood winck them-selues in the knowledge of nature, as though Gods power could not alter the nature of any thing from what it was before vnto mans knowledge.

So, not only are the elements of hoodwink old, the word itself has been around for quite a while.

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Sources:

An Apologie of Priuate Masse, London: T. Powell, 1562, 8. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Augustine. Of the Citie of God. John Healey, trans. London: George Eld, 1610, 21.8, 848. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Épinal-Erfurt Glossary Project, Dictionary of Old English Project, University of Toronto, 2019. Épinal, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 72 (2), fols. 94–107. 

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hoodwink, v., hood, n.1, wink, v.1.

Sweet, Henry. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society, London: N. Trübner & Co., 1871, chap. 39, 286. London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius MS B.xi.

copacetic

13 January 2021

Copacetic is an Americanism that means fine or satisfactory. The origin is not known with certainty, but we have a pretty good guess.

As far anyone can tell, the copacetic, in its earliest incarnations spelled copasetic, pops up first in Irvin Bacheller’s 1919 novel A Man for the Ages, about Abraham Lincoln. The word appears three times in the novel, and all three instances are either spoken by or in reference to a Mrs. Lukins, a character in the book. The first of these is:

Now there's the kind of a man! Stout as a buffalo an' as to looks I'd call him, as ye might say, real copasetic." Mrs. Lukins expressed this opinion solemnly and with a slight cough. Its last word stood for nothing more than an indefinite depth of meaning.

About halfway through the book, there is this comment about her vocabulary:

There was one other word in her lexicon which was in the nature of a jewel to be used only on special occasions. It was the word "copasetic." The best society of Salem Hill understood perfectly that it signalized an unusual depth of meaning.

And toward the end there is this:

In the words of Mrs. Lukins “it is very copasetic,” and I begin to feel that I have made some progress in the study of Bim Kelso.

Despite many hours of searching by numerous researchers, no one has been able to find an earlier instance of the word. As a result, it seems likely that Bacheller coined the term for the character and Mrs. Lukins’s speech is akin to the malapropisms of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop. If this is the case, copacetic may be Bacheller’s blending of the Latin copia (plenty) with ceterum (otherwise, in other respects).

Supporting this conjecture is the fact that Mrs. Lukins also uses the word coralapus, which like copacetic has not been antedated, but unlike copacetic does not seem to have a life outside this novel. Bacheller also coined Latinate words in his other writing.

The following year we see the word start to slip into slang usage. The Chicago Daily Tribune of 21 August 1920 reprinted an advertisement that had run in the Times of London a few weeks before as an example of a faux pas implying cannibalism:

VERY COPASETIC
(From the London Times.)
Good position—French lady, cooks herself, speaks English, beautiful climate; exchange of money favourable; good references. Déjardin 18, Porte Gayole, Boulogne.

The original ad in the Times did not have the headline copasetic. That headline is commentary on the ad by the Chicago paper.

Copacetic also appears in the 1920 song “At the New Jump Steady Ball” by Black songwriters Tom Delaney and Sidney Easton:

Copasetic was the password for one and all, At the New Jump Steady Ball!

The song was recorded in 1921 by Ethel Waters. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was also known for having used the word, and it entered into American slang, especially that of Black speakers.

While the evidence that Bacheller actually coined the word is strong, it’s possible that he, wittingly or not, plucked a word that was already floating about the ether and used it in his novel. But it would be odd for a writer like Bacheller, who seemed attuned to slang and neologisms, to put a current slang term in the mouth of character who was supposed to have lived many decades before. But without more evidence, we cannot be sure which direction the word flows, from Bacheller into slang or vice versa.

Copacetic is also known for having a large number of explanations, all false, attached to its origin. It has been speculated that it comes from Chinook jargon, from Hebrew, from Louisiana French, from Italian, and with utmost absurdity from “the cop is on the settee.” None of these are plausible in the least.

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Sources:

Bacheller, Irving. A Man for the Ages. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1919, 69, 287, 401. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Delaney, Tom and Sidney Easton. “At the New Jump Steady Ball.” 1920.  DigitalCommons@UMaine.

Goranson, Stephen. “Copasetic.” Language Log, 3 March 2017.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. copacetic, adj.

“A Line o’ Type or Two.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 August 1920, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Merriam-Webster.com, 2020, s.v. copacetic, adj.

“Nursing Homes.” Times (London), 22 July 1920, 4. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. copacetic, adj.

sedition

12 January 2021

Sedition has a rather straightforward etymology; it’s from the Latin seditio, via the Anglo-Norman sediciun. The Latin word literally means a going apart; the se- prefix, denoting separation, can also be seen in secession and separate. And the -it- is a form of the verb ire, meaning to go. That’s the literal meaning Latin, but the word was used to refer to insurrection or civil discord, or in poetic works to strife or quarrel.

The Latin word appears in Anglo-Latin texts by the eighth century. In one glossary it is defined as:

Seditio . perturbata . simulatio.

(Sedition:  pretenses/deceits that cause discord)

And it appears as a definition in another entry:

Tumultus . seditio.

(rebellion: sedition.)

But the word is not used in English until the 1380s, when it was borrowed or influenced by the Anglo-Norman sediciun, meaning treachery. It appears in a Wycliffite translation of the biblical book Deeds 24 (Acts 24) in a passage about Paul’s trial before Felix. Here sedition is being used in the sense of violent civil strife or dissension:

We han founden this man beringe venym, or pestilence, and stiringe sedicioun, or dissencioun, to alle Jewis in al the world, and auctour of seducioun of the secte of Nazarens; the which also enforside for to defoule the temple; whom and takun to, we wolden deme, aftir oure lawe.

(We have found this man bearing venom, or pestilence, and stirring sedition, or dissention, to all Jews in the all the world, and author of the sedition of the sect of the Nazarenes, which also undertook to defile the temple, whom we have taken and would judge under our law.)

The Vulgate Bible uses seditio in this passage.

By c.1450 sedition was being used to mean insurrection when it appears in a translation of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (Of Famous Women) in a passage about Medea:

And, whan she saw hym, forthwith, anon-right
Hir feith and trouth to hym she dydde plyght:
Cupydo ys bronde so sore had hir inflamed,
That hym to folow she was no-thynge ashamed,

But stale out priuely of hir faders lond
And— ȝit wele wersse—made a sedicyon
Ageyns hir fader with powere and stronge honde,
The comunalte to make an insurreccion,
That she and and hir dereward luf Jason
Myght eskape, vnknowynge the kynge,
Whyle he was occupyed in werfarynge .

(And when she was him, forthwith and instantly, she pledged her faith and troth to him: Cupid’s torch had inflamed her so fervently that she was in no way ashamed to follow him but stole out of her father’s land secretly. And—yet more sinfully—She made a sedition against her father with a powerful and strong hand. The nation to make an insurrection, so that she and her then-dear love Jason might escape without the king knowing, while he was occupied in warfare.)

The general sense of violent strife or dissension dropped out of use in the seventeenth century, leaving the sense of insurrection, and particular inciting an insurrection, as the sense in use today.

In the United States today, there is no crime of sedition, per se, but there is a crime of seditious conspiracy. 18 U.S. Code § 2384 — Seditious Conspiracy reads:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

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Sources:

“18 U.S. Code § 2384 — Seditious Conspiracy.” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed 11 January 2021.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND1), 1992, s.v. sedicun.

Deeds 24. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions, vol. 4 of 4. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1850, 579. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 369. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. seditio. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Hessels, Jan Hendrik. An Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890, 107, 117. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 144. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. seditio. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sedition, n., se-, prefix.

Schleich, Gustav. "Die Mittelenglische Umdichtung von Boccaccios De claris mulieribus," Palaestra, 144, 1924, lines 1320–30, 65. London, British Library, Additional 10304. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

honky

11 January 2021

Today, we know honky as an Americanism, a contemptuous, Black slang term for a white person. This sense of the term was in its heyday in the 1970s, and while you still encounter it, honky has become less common. But this use in Black slang is only attested from the 1940s, and the term itself dates to the turn of the twentieth century when it referred to immigrants from Eastern Europe, and often appeared in the context of manual or factory laborers. Honky is a variation on Hungarian.

The form hunk is attested on 13 January 1896 in the pages of the New York Herald:

The average Pennsylvanian contemptuously refers to these immigrants as “Hikes” and “Hunks.” The “Hikes” are Italians and Sicilians. “Hunks” is a corruption for Huns, but under this title the Pennsylvanian includes Hungarians, Lithuanians, Slavs, Poles, Magyars and Tyroleans. A writer who recently described a trip to Mars told of the race of Ambau—dwarfed and apelike creatures that performed menial services for the Martian people. The Pennsylvanian regards the Hikes and Hunks as far below Ambau.

The form bohunk is attested in 1903, and hunky in 1910.

The honky / honkies spelling appears in the pages of the Railroad Telegrapher in January 1904 in a discussion of unionization of the railroads and the Order of Railroad Telegraphers (O.R.T.):

The men at “CA,” Orrville, say they are getting enough wages now; don’t care to earn any more. They put me in mind of some “honkies” that were working for this road. A contractor came to them and offered them more money. They spokesman stepped forward and said: “We wanti no more job, we maki ‘nough mon.” The three men at “CA” would rather throw levers for two roads and do telegraphing for two roads for they money they are getting now than to join the O.R.T. and do the same amount of work for more money.

The above quotation doesn’t make clear what honkies means, but writing in April 1916 Samuel Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor, uses and explains the term:

These workers have not yet become assimilated and part of our nation. Their outlook is less broad Their conceptions of their own rights and the freedom that ought to be theirs are far less complete than what they should be, but, nevertheless, these foreigners—“Dagoes, Wops, Honkies," call them what you will—are human beings with hearts and souls, and all of them have the natural desires of human beings and infinite possibilities of human development.

The slang of jazz took up the term, and it appears in this context in clarinetist and cannabis aficionado Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow’s 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues:

I’m standing under the Tree of Hope, pushing my gauge. The vipers come up, one by one.

FIRST CAT: Hey there Poppa Mezz, is you anywhere?

ME: Man I'm down with it, stickin' like a honky.

FIRST CAT: Lay a trey on me, ole man.

Mezzrow conveniently supplies a translation of his “jive”:

(I’m standing under the Tree of Hope, selling my marihuana. The customers come up, one by one.

FIRST CAT: Hello Mezz, have you got any marihuana?

ME: Plenty, old man, my pockets are full as a factory hand's on payday.

FIRST CAT: Let me have three cigarettes.)

Note that Mezzrow is still associating honky with “factory hands,” so the term at this point still has class as well as racial connotations.

Mezzrow, who was white and Jewish, was well known for his collaborations with Black musicians, and much of what he himself terms “jive” in his book is Black slang. From the slang of jazz, honky moved into general Black slang. Stokely Carmichael, chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is recorded as using the term on 10 April 1967, an early appearance of the Black slang usage appearing in a mainstream, White publication:

During the rioting, a newsman asked a group of students: “Why are you doing this?”

One replied: “Because the white people are running our university.” Carmichael, during an appearance here Thursday night, told students: “The honkies—whites—are dictating your lives.”

By the late 1960s honky had lost any class or intra-White ethnic connotations and had simply come to mean a white person.

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Sources:

“Arrested for Mafia Murders.” New York Herald, 13 January 1896, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.

Gompers, Samuel. “Editorials.” American Federationist, 23.4, April 1916, 280–81. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. honkie, n., bohunk, n., hunky, n.

Mezzrow, Milton “Mezz” and Bernard Wolfe. Really the Blues. New York: Random House, 1946, 216, 354. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Negro Students Battle Cops at Fisk University.” Bridgeport Telegram (Connecticut), 10 April 1967, 4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. honky, n. and adj.; September 2020, bohunk, n. and adj.; second edition, 1989, s.v. hunk, n.3.

The Railroad Telegrapher, 21.1, January 1904, 85. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

lickspittle

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.