Charlie

January 27, 2021

27 January 2021

Charlie has many slang meanings, but perhaps the best-known today is the American Vietnam War slang for the Vietcong, the enemy. But this sense is rooted in an older, racist term for Asians in general.

Charlie has long been a slang term for an unnamed or non-specific man, often used in informally addressing a man whose name one does not know. This sense dates to the early nineteenth century. From the New-York Mirror of 2 April 1825:

A few days ago, a gentleman being rather fatigued, called a coachee—“What will you take me about the distance of a mile for?”—“Twenty-five cents,sir.”—“Well open the door,” and in he got. In a few minutes they arrived at the place proposed.—Having alighted, the twenty-five cents was tendered—“This is not enough, sir.”—“Why, it was your price.”—“Yes, sir, but it is not enough, and I won’t take it.”—“How much is enough?”—“Half a dollar, sir”—“Well, rather than dispute with such an infernal pickpocket, I’ll pay you”—and the gentleman left Charley turning over the silver, quite satisfied with his success in making, as he expressed himself, “the flats pay for their experience.[“] Now we would seriously inquire, whether such conduct ought not to be severely punished by the proper authorities?—A law should be made to bring all such fellows to a proper sense of their duty.

About a century later, a Black English slang sense of Mr. Charlie appears in print, meaning a White person, often used contemptuously. From the glossary of Black slang terms that appears at the end of Rudolph Fisher’s 1928 Harlem Renaissance novel The Walls of Jericho:

MISS ANNE
MR. CHARLIE
Non-specific designation of “swell” whites. Ex. “Boy, bootlegging pays. That boogy’s got a straight-eight just like Mr. Charlie’s.”

This slang sense of Mr. Charlie continues up to the present day.

Use of Charlie to refer to an Asian, in particular a Chinese man, appears about the same time, probably influenced by the fictional Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan, who makes his literary debut in 1925 in the novel The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers. The use of Charlie referring to a generic Chinese man is in place by 1938 in A.I. Bezzerides novel The Long Haul (adapted for the screen in 1940 with the title They Drive by Night, starring Humphrey Bogart and George Raft):

He walked to the Chinaman, “Hey, Charlie, what you know?”

But as with many racial slurs, the use of Charlie was not precise and could be applied to any Asian man. During World War II, the Japanese were often dubbed Charlie. From Time magazine of 9 February 1942, reporting on the fighting on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines:

The Jap, who is variously “Mr. Moto,” “Tojo,” “Charlie,” or “the Japanzy” to U.S. troops, was beginning to show a heavy preference for night movement, when concealment is best.

And Bedcheck Charley (also Washing-Machine Charlie) was the nickname applied to solitary, Japanese planes that harassed U.S. troops at night. From an Associated Press story of 12 January 1944 reporting from the Gilbert Islands:

First it was the snipers. Then it was trigger-happy Americans who thought they heard snipers.
But now it’s “Bedcheck Charley,” a Japanese bomber that comes over this base just as hard-working GIs settle down for a night’s sleep.

And Bedcheck Charlie would also appear on the European front late in the war, referring to solitary, harassing German planes, the term evidently having made its way there from the Pacific. From a story by a correspondent who was hospitalized on the night they received news of Franklin Roosevelt’s death in the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender:

It was the quietest night I ever experienced there for nobody talked any more and the only sounds were muffled sniffles from all of us at this blow that made us all oblivious to our wounds. When “Bedcheck Charlie,” the German plane, who strafes and bombs night convoys, came over at his usual hour, everyone was awake, but this time nobody commented on the machine-like staccato booms that every one of us knew would send in more wounded from that strafed convoy travelling up front.

In this last, the sense of solitary night raider had overridden the racist connotation of the term.

During the Korean war, the term was again applied by American servicemen referring to enemy combatants. In the cases I have found, the appellation is to Chinese soldiers, but I would think it was applied to North Koreans too. (Charlie is a difficult term to search for since there are so many uses of it as a nickname for Charles.)

Two of these refer back to the Charlie Chan origin, one obliquely and one directly. From the Austin Statesman of 17 January 1951, about soldiers on the front lines publishing a regimental newspaper:

Their paper has been put out by candlelight, Korean gaslight and flashlight. It has gone to press in bombed out buildings, abandoned factories, in the open fields, in tents and in creek beds.
Its editors sometimes have to melt the frozen ink on the stove to publish, but no difficulty yet has stopped them.
“We were busy cranking out copies six hours before Charlie Chang kicked us out of Pyongyang,” said Sgt. Fulcher, smiling. “But we made our deadline.”

And the Chicago Defender of 10 February 1951:

When Charlie Chan’s hordes struck UN forces last November, 25th Division had to high-tail it out of Chongchon River area after destroying thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

And Bed-check Charley made his appearance in Korea too. From an Associated Press piece of 20 June 1951:

“Bed-check Charley,” a single-engined Communist nuisance raider, was out again early today. The plane bombed and strafed the Uijongu area about 10 miles north of Seoul.

Having been applied to Asian enemy combatants in the last two wars, when U.S. troops entered the Vietnam War, Charlie was used there as well. From Newsweek magazine of 9 August 1965:

The American GI’s whose mission is to kill him, call the enemy simply, “Old Charley”—an elusive, slippery fellow out there somewhere, beyond the next paddy field, or lurking in the next clump of bush.

It’s commonly claimed that the Vietnam use of Charlie stems from the use of the military phonetic alphabet letters Victor Charlie to refer to the Vietcong or VC, the communist insurgents in South Vietnam. But as we have seen, this is not the origin of this use of Charlie. Rather it reinforces the existing use. And in so doing, it served two purposes that benefited the U.S. military: it served to obscure the racist origin of the term, and it helped distinguish the South Vietnamese allies from the enemy.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “‘Bedcheck Charley’ Keeps GIs Awake.” Christian Science Monitor, 12 January 1944, 6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Associated Press. “Reds Again Lose Big Jet Battle; Fight in Hills.” The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania), 20 June 1951, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Boyle, Hal (Associated Press). “Regiment’s ‘Daily’ Meets Frontline Need for News.” Austin Statesman, 17 January 1951, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Fisher, Rudolph. The Walls of Jericho (1928). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, 303. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. Charlie, n., charlie, n.2, charlie, n.6, Mr. Charlie, n.

Lighter, J.E., Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1994, s.v. Charlie or Charley, n.

New-York Mirror, and Ladies’ Literary Gazette, 2 April 1825, 287. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 and draft additions, June 2014, s.v. Charlie | Charley, n.

“A Small Plot of U.S. Soil.” Time, 9 February 1942, 23. Time Magazine Archive.

“The War No One Wants—Or Can End.” Newsweek, 9 August 1965, 17. ProQuest Magazines.

Wilson, L. Alex. “Chatter About GIs in Korea.” Chicago Defender, 10 February 1951, 14. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Fox Film Corporation, 1931. Public domain image.

deadname

January 26, 2021

26 January 2021

Deadname, or dead name, is a term for someone’s old name after a name change, especially in regard to a transgender person’s adoption of a name that conforms with their gender identity. It is rude to refer to a trans person by their deadname.

Deadname was in use by the trans community for years before cisgender English speakers became aware of it, a pattern common to slang terms where a niche use long precedes general awareness.

The earliest instance of deadname that I have found is a tweet from 19 July 2011:

Change ups can be good. Though its weird to hear my deadname in use two days straight...

From the tweet’s wording it’s clear that the term was already in use within the trans community by this date, and earlier uses will no doubt be found.

Six months later, a Canadian clothing line featuring “Stuff Cis People Say” included “What do you mean your ‘dead name’?” as an option on some of their clothing. The designer, going by the avatar Patience Newbury, had this to say about it. Her claim to having coined the term is incorrect, but it is one of the early published uses of the term that I have found:

Fifth from the “Stuff Cis People Say” series (a derivation of the 2011 Sh*t White People Say meme). Apparel typesetting produced under the Patience Newbury avatar for the Cisnormativity Project.
This intertitle gave accidental birth to “dead name” (also “deadname”). It was a genuine surprise to realize it took on a life of its own. Dead name was the second instance of having introduced a linguistic expression now part of an everyday vernacular, but it was the first for which I was glad to bear witness to its widespread adoption.

Deadname makes its way into Urbandictionary on 16 September 2014 with this entry:

deadname
n. The birth name of somebody who has changed their name. Most commonly attributed to trans people, but can be attributed to any person who has changed their name. (sometimes written as two words: dead name)
v. 1. To call somebody by their deadname.
v. 2. To out somebody's deadname to the public.
Don't call her by her deadname. She hasn't gone by that name in years.

The Boston Globe is the earliest “mainstream” publication I have found that used the word. From a 5 January 2016 article about model and performer Hari Nef:

I feel like I have always been Hari, said Nef, who prefers that her “deadname” not be used in print. (Deadname, she explains, “is a word we use to describe the name we were assigned before Choosing our own.”)

And in April 2016, Anastacia Tomson’s autobiography, Always Anastacia: A Transgender Life in South Africa, had this passage:

I stand in front of the mirror as I remind myself that I don’t have to wear the uniform anymore. I don’t have to dress myself in men’s attire. I can grow out my nails, and paint them with polish. I am finally free to have my ears pierced. I can speak in the voice that I’ve spent so many hours cultivating with my speech therapist. I don’t have to hide my disgust anymore at being called “boet” or “sir.” I no longer have to tolerate any references to my deadname.

The fact that deadname was being used by the trans community globally before traditional media outlets started using it can be chalked up to the internet. The online information networks allow niche communities to find and connect with each other in ways that were not previously possible, opening up new channels for neologisms to propagate within a particular community before speakers generally become aware of it.

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Sources:

@mynameisalice87, Twitter, 19 July 2011.

“Anastacia Tomson presents her story in Always Anastacia: A Transgender Life in South Africa.” Sunday Times Books Live, 26 April 2016.

Matchan, Lindo. “Pioneer Woman.” Boston Globe, 5 January 2016, G7. ProQuest Newspapers.

Newbury, Patience. “Intertitle: ‘What do you mean, your “dead name”?’” Accozzaglia.ca, 11 January 2012.

Urbandictionary, 16 September 2014, s.v. deadname.

pussyfoot

January 25, 2021

25 January 2021

Pussyfoot, along with its inflections like pussyfooting and pussyfooter, generally refers to caution, hesitancy, and delicacy. It can also convey evasiveness or even deception. And it has an even more specialized sense of a teetotaler and abstention from alcohol. It can be a noun, verb, or adjective.

Its origin is quite straightforward and obvious. It is a metaphor for a cat-like tread, but the connection to the anti-saloon movement and prohibition is less than obvious.

The adjective pussy-footed is in place by 1893 when it is used in Scribner’s Magazine to describe the Republican Convention of 1860 which nominated Abraham Lincoln as its presidential candidate:

The brief speech of Curtis’s was, next to the nominations themselves, the feature of the proceedings around which most interest centered; it was high-water mark. As to the effect of it, I suppose it was simply to shake up and put courage into men who were beginning to walk pussy-footed and shy at shadows.

To walk pussy-footed is pretty much a direct metaphor of a cat’s movement, but by 1899 the term had become more allusive, although with the reference to cushions (the pads on a cat’s paw) there is still a connection to cats. From the Colorado Citizen of 27 July 1899:

Ex-Senator Pugh of Alabama, now in Washington, doesn’t wear any cushions on his political views, nor does he believe in trying to win by pussy-foot methods.

By 1905, pussy-footing was being used in a completely figurative sense, with no allusions to cats. Here is an article from the Atlanta Constitution of 20 March 1905, that describes the campaigning-for-president-without-actually-announcing-one’s-candidacy that is so familiar to us today. In this case the candidate, Vice President Charles Fairbanks, had only been inaugurated three weeks before (again, campaigning for the next election as soon as the last one is over is nothing new):

Vice President Charles Warren Fairbanks is pussy-footing it around Washington accompanied everywhere by a presidential lightning rod reaching even above his scanty covered heard. His glad handing is as pronounced and prolific as it was out at Chicago where it was his joyous practice to shake hands with every man he saw and every time he saw him, utterly regardless of the personal comfort of the victim. In every movement, every gesture, every suggestion he is now as much a candidate for the presidential nomination as will be in the springtime of 1908—and perhaps a good deal more.

The connection to teetotals and prohibition arises from the nickname of the noted prohibitionist William E. “Pussyfoot” Johnson, something of a proto-Eliot Ness. He earned the nickname due to his reputation for stealth in combatting bootleggers in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) c. 1906. A 1920 biography gives the following story as to how Johnson acquired his nickname:

The pool hall keeper studied him, and concluding that he was a genuine customer, opened a trap door, took out a bottle of spirits and handed it over. Johnson poured out the drink and then demanded some tobacco. The saloon keeper had a .44 revolver sticking out of each hip pocket and was the kind of man who would shoot at the first suspicion. Johnson wanted to get him in such a position that he could not readily reach his gun. The man turned round to take his tobacco jar down out of a cupboard. Instantly Johnson had whipped the revolvers out of his pockets and placed their cold barrels on the ears of the bravo. He had his man disarmed and led out a prisoner in no time. 'The West then named him " Pussyfoot."

Pussyfoot was being applied to prohibitionists generally within only a few years. From the Nebraska State Journal of 9 March 1910:

Five weeks at the most will see the end of the license campaign. Thus far such campaigning as the men are doing who want to put the saloons back has been a pussyfoot performance of prodigious perfection. It is impossible to extort so much as an echo from the pro-saloon side. The union veterans republican club endorses the dry policy, but nobody stands up to be counted with the wets.

Pussyfoot is commonly associated with Theodore Roosevelt, and he is known to have used the term on many occasions, but he is not the coiner. Although we can credit Roosevelt as one who helped popularize it. And it should be noted that Charles Fairbanks was his vice president, and the Atlanta Constitution article cited above may have used pussy-footing in that particular article because it was associated with his boss.

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Sources:

Bromley, Isaac H. “Historic Moments: The Nomination of Lincoln.” Scribner’s Magazine, 14.5, November 1893, 653. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

McKenzie, Frederick Arthur. “Pussyfoot” Johnson, Crusader—Reformer—a Man Among Men. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1920, 88. Internet Archive.

Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln), 9 March 1910, 6/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Ohl, Joseph. “Pussy-Footing by Fairbanks.” Atlanta Constitution, 20 March 1905, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. [The OED gives the date of this citation as 1903, but that’s an error probably due to either a simple typo or to ProQuest’s scanned copy having an unreadable date. The context of the article places it, without question, from 1905.]

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. pussyfoot, adj. and n., pussyfoot, v., pussy-footed, adj., pussyfooter, n., pussyfooting, n., pussyfooting, adj.

“Washington Letter.” Colorado Citizen, 27 July 1899, 1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 24 April 1920. Library of Congress, public domain image.

pros from Dover

January 22, 2021

22 January 2021

The pros from Dover is a phrase that is often used to denote expertise and excellence. For instance, there is this describing U.S. President George W. Bush’s national-security team from the January/February 2004 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Next to the vice president, the person closest to the Oval Office is the national security advisor. For George Bush this is Condoleezza Rice. Like Cheney—like a number of the pros from Dover—Rice is no stranger to the issues, or even to the national security staff.

Or there is a 6 August 2019 post to the social media site LinkedIn about a firm that installs gymnasium and sports flooring titled “The Pros From Dover.”

Many of those who use the phrase recognize that it comes from the 1970 Robert Altman film M*A*S*H, but they are unaware that its use in the movie is in a completely different sense, that of a con man who is using false credentials, pretty much exactly the opposite of what those using the phrase intend.

The phrase first appears in 1968 book M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker, about army surgeons during the Korean War. In the book, the character Hawkeye is described as using the guise of being the pro from Dover to obtain free entrance to golf courses:

[Hawkeye] would walk confidently into a pro shop, smile, comment upon the nice condition of the course, explain that he was just passing through and that he was Joe, Dave or Jack Somebody, the pro from Dover. This resulted, about eight times out of ten, in an invitation to play for free. If forced into conversation, he became the pro from Dover, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, England, Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee, or Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, whichever seemed safest.

Later in the book, Hawkeye and fellow surgeon Trapper John are called from Korea to Tokyo to perform surgery on a congressman’s son. The two surgeons recognize the work could be done by any competent surgeon, no special expertise required, and decide to do the operation quickly so they can go golfing. The following exchange takes place:

“All right,” Trapper said. “Somebody trot out the latest pictures of this kid with the shell fragment in his chest.”
No one moved.
“Snap it up!” yelled Hawkeye. “We’re the pros from Dover, and the last pictures we saw must be forty-eight hours old by now.”

This latter exchange is repeated in the 1970 movie, but the earlier explanation for the term pros from Dover that is in the novel is not present in the film’s script. People who had seen the movie, but not read the book, started using the phrase to mean experts without understanding that Hawkeye was using the term facetiously, referring to an old con he used to run.

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Sources:

Altman, Robert, dir. M*A*S*H, Richard Hooker (novel) and Ring Lardner, Jr. (screenplay), writers, 20th Century Fox, 1970.

Dougherty, Robert. “The Pros from Dover.” LinkedIn, 6 August 2019.

Hooker, Richard (pen name of Hiester Richard Hornberger, Jr.). M*A*S*H. New York: William Morrow, 1968.

Prados, John. “The Pros from Dover.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 60.1, January/February 2004, 46.

Photo credit: Altman, Robert, dir. M*A*S*H, Richard Hooker (novel) and Ring Lardner, Jr. (screenplay), writers, 20th Century Fox, 1970. Fair use of a low-resolution still from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.

open access

January 21, 2021

Open Access logo, a stylized representation of an open padlock

21 January 2021

How does a term relating to sexual freedom and sex work become a rallying cry for librarians and academic researchers?

Open access is a buzzword in academia today, referring to a mode of publishing where any reader can view the published work for free. To understand the necessity of the concept, one must first understand the business model of academic publishing. A researcher, almost always employed by a university which pays their salary, conducts the research, which is often funded by government grants. They then submit it to a journal for publication. The editor, who, except for the largest journals, is a fellow academic who receives little or no compensation, then farms it out to a number of unpaid, volunteer, peer reviewers, fellow academics in the same field, who make recommendations for changes and as to whether or not it should be published. (This step can be repeated several times until the piece passes muster.) The editor makes the publication decision. The publisher sells the journal, at often exorbitant prices so that it is pretty much only bought by university libraries. The publisher not only gets free labor, but then charges those who funded and produced the work for access to it. It’s quite a racket, subsidized by the researchers, the universities, and taxpayers. Open access seeks to change this business model, reduce the cost of the academic enterprise, and make available the results of research to a wider range of researchers who can build on the work, especially those not affiliated with research universities that can afford to pay the high costs of the journals.

Open access publishing, on the other hand, comprises a number of different business models for funding the publication, with the common factor being that final publication is available to all at no cost (other than perhaps that of internet access).

But this sense of open access is quite recent, and the phrase dates to the sixteenth century, originally referring to sexual license, being open to sexual advances, and prostitution. A 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives has this:

But he that rauisheth or forcibly taketh awaye a free woman, is only condemned to paye a hundred siluer drachmes. And he that was the Pandor to procure her, should only paye twenty drachmes. Onles she had bene a common strumpet or curtisan: for such doe iustefy open accesse, to all that will hier them.

Other early uses of the phrase are in the same context.

By the mid eighteenth century however, the sense of the phrase had generalized and lost its sexual connotation, coming to mean a freedom to engage in communications and dealings with others regardless of social status. From the preface to a 1762 biography of British politician Richard Nash:

He was the first who diffused a desire of society, and an easiness of address among a whole people who were formerly censured by foreigners for a reservedness of behaviour, and an aukward timidity in their first approaches. He first taught a familiar intercourse among strangers at Bath and Tunbridge, which still subsists among them. That ease and open access first acquired there, our gentry brought back. to the metropolis, and thus the whole kingdom by degrees became more refined by lessons originally derived from him.

And by the end of the eighteenth century, open access was being used quite literally to refer to general availability of something. From the 1793 Patriot, a pamphlet about revolutionary France written by the political reformer (not the novelist) Thomas Hardy:

By the Constituent Assembly, [liberty] was understood to imply an equal participation of privileges, and an open access to office and employment, indiscriminately provided for all ranks of men: this was the good sense of the term.

Open access entered the discourse of librarians in the waning years of the nineteenth century, referring to the practice of open stacks, allowing patrons the freedom to browse books on the libraries’ shelves. This is, of course, a more specialized application of the general sense given above. From the 1894 volume of the journal The Library:

Somewhere about 1725, Allan Ramsay, a Scots poet, established in Edinburgh a circulating library, to the shelves of which the readers had open access. Since then, every proprietary library, society library and mechanics’ institute has allowed direct access with more or less freedom. In Cambridge Public Library the practice dates from 1858; and the British Museum and Patent Office, London, furnish examples of unrestricted access to shelves probably unequalled anywhere outside the Australian colonies. The practice is one of very long standing in Britain, and though far from general in public libraries will probably be extended to most of them in the course of a few years.

By the 1990s, the excessive cost and long-term sustainability of the traditional academic publishing model began to be called into question, and the movement toward what would become known as open access began, the name probably taken out of its familiarity in a library context. A 2001 conference in Budapest drew together various efforts in this regard and formed the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and the group’s public statement in February 2002 was one of the first uses of open access in this particular sense:

For various reasons, this kind of free and unrestricted online availability, which we will call open access, has so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature. But even in these limited collections, many different initiatives have shown that open access is economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact.
[...]
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

That’s how a term originally associated with bawds, courtesans, and prostitutes made its way into the ivory tower.

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Sources:

“American and British Libraries.—Fytte 2.” The Library, vol. 6. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co., 1894, 114. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Budapest Open Access Initiative, 14 February 2002.

Goldsmith, Oliver, ed. The Life of Richard Nash, second edition. London: J. Newberry, 1762, vii. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hardy, Thomas. The Patriot: Addressed to the People, on the Present State of Affairs in Britain and in France. Edinburgh: J. Dickson, 1793, 56. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2004, s.v. open access, n. and adj.

Plutarch. “The Life of Solon.” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Compared Together. Thomas North, trans. London: Thomas Vautroullier and John Wright, 1579, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credits: Logo designed by the Public Library of Science (PLoS); public domain graphic.