Ivy League

Ivy-covered Nassau Hall (built 1756), the original building of Princeton University, a large stone building with a cupola

19 February 2021

This name for the group of prestigious northeastern U.S. colleges dates to the 1930s. It is a reference to the old, ivy-covered buildings on those campuses.

Even before the league was so named, the schools in the Ivy League operated as an informal collegiate athletic association that originally had ten members: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and the U.S. Military and Naval Academies at West Point and Annapolis. The schools scheduled games and meets with each other and made attempts to create a formal league, but there was no formal organization until 1954 when the league was formalized under the auspices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The eight private schools are members (i.e., without the two military academies; despite what its name may imply, the University of Pennsylvania is a private institution, not a state school). It played its first games as a formal organization in 1956.

The earliest reference to the grouping that I’m aware of is in the form ivy colleges in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune of 14 October 1933. The other schools mentioned here are who the proto-Ivy League football teams were playing that week; they are not among the ivy colleges:

A proportion of our Eastern ivy colleges are meeting little fellows another Saturday before plunging into the strife and turmoil. In this classification are Columbia, which will meet a weak Virginia team; Harvard, which will engage New Hampshire; Dartmouth, which is playing Bates; Brown; which is meeting Springfield; Princeton, which will strive against Williams; Army, which is paired with Delaware, and Penn, which is opening its season belatedly against Franklin and Marshall.

The form Ivy League appears two years later in an Associated Press piece from 7 February 1935 about an early attempt to formalize the league with Brown University (i.e., the Bruins or Bears) as a member:

BRUINS QUALIFY FOR IVY LEAGUE BY LONG HISTORY

Has Friendly Relations With Members; Army and Navy Not Likely Members

NEW YORK, Feb. 7.—(AP)—The so-called “Ivy league” which is in the process of formation among a group of the older Eastern universities now seems to have welcomed Brown into the fold and automatically assumed the proportions of a “big eight.”

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Sources:

Associated Press. “Bruins Qualify for Ivy League by Long History.” Columbia Record (South Carolina), 7 February 1935, 12. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Ivy League, n.

Woodward, Stanley. “Navy Eleven Travels to Pittsburgh Today.” New York Herald Tribune, 14 October 1933, 16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Anonymous photographer, 2012, public domain image.

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ADS-L.

Lent

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559. Painting of a village scene depicting revelers clashing with fasters; in the foreground is a jousting match between a fat man riding a beer cask and holding a lance adorned with various meats and a religious ascetic with a lance adorned with fish.

18 February 2021

In the Christian liturgical calendar, Lent is the season of fasting prior to Easter. It’s an odd word to the modern ear and has nothing to do with lending anything. Rather, the name comes from the Old English word lencten, originally designating the season of spring. The Old English word comes from a West Germanic root meaning long, a reference to the lengthening of days during the season.

For example, the word appears in an interlinear gloss of the Latin text of Psalm 73 in the Vespasian Psalter. The gloss was written in the Mercian dialect in the early ninth century:

Tu fecisti omnes terminos terrae, aestatem et uer tu fecisti ea

ðu dydes all gemæru eorðan sumur & lenten ðu dydes ða.

(You made all the boundaries of the earth: summer and spring, you made these.)

But in Old English lencten also came to mean the period of fasting prior to Easter, which happens in the spring. An entry in the Peterborough Chronicle for the year 1014 uses the word in an ambiguous sense. It could mean simply spring, or it could refer specifically to Lent. While the entry is for 1014, it was copied c. 1121*:

Ða com Æðelred cyning innan þam lenctene ham to his agenre ðeode, & he glædlice fram heom eallum onfangen wæs.

Then, during Lent, King Ethelred came home to his own people, and he was gladly received by them all.

That same chronicle, for the year 1107, uses the word to undisputedly refer to the liturgical period of fasting. Again, this entry was copied c. 1121:

On þisum geare to Cristesmæssan wæs se cyng Henri on Normandig & þet land on his geweald dihte & sette, & þæræfter to længtene hider to lande com.

(In this year King Henry was in Normandy at Christmas and in that land in his dominion he ruled and dwelled, and after that at Lent came back to this land.)

The word spring, metaphorically referring to the arising of new plant life, makes its appearance in the fourteenth century, and with it the use of lent to refer to the season faded, leaving us only with the liturgical meaning.

* The series of early medieval English historical chronicles often called by the misnomer Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were all produced, directly or indirectly, from a single exemplar. Scribes would copy older entries from a version they had access to and then add new entries for each year as it passed. As a result, the different chronicles all start off identically with one of the earlier versions but diverge idiosyncratically at different points. The Peterborough Chronicle was started c. 1121, with unique entries starting in 1122 and continuing through 1154.

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Sources:

Irvine, Susan, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition 7 MS E, vol. 7 of 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004, 71, 115. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 636. JSTOR.

Kuhn, Sherman M., ed. The Vespasian Psalter. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1965, 70. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A.1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. lent(en.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2017, s.v. Lent, n.1, Lenten, n. and adj., spring, n.1

Image credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain image.

ivory tower

Image from a c.1500 Netherlandish manuscript depicting the annunciation of the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:26–28). Mary is in a walled garden seated on the ground reading a book with a unicorn placing its front legs and head in her lap (symbol of virginity). Also inside the wall are a tower (Song of Solomon 7:4), an altar, and a fleece (Judges 6:36–40) that is illuminated with a ray of light descending from a cloud. Outside the wall behind Mary is a burning bush (Exodus 3:2) and in the foreground the angel Gabriel blowing a horn and being led by two hounds on leashes. The image is framed by botanical drawings.

17 February 2021

The ivory tower is a metaphor for a place where one can cut oneself off from the affairs of the world, a place of solitary, often mental pursuits. Today, it’s most commonly used as a negative reference to academia, but it can also be applied to poets, hobbyists, or navel-gazers of any sort.

The image of an ivory tower appears in the Song of Solomon 7:4. From the Revised (King James) Version:

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.

In medieval and Renaissance art and poetry, an ivory tower came to represent purity in general and the Virgin Mary in particular. And there are many such appearances of the term and imagery in literature and art through to the present day.

The present-day use of the phrase ivory tower in English, however, is a calque of the French tour d’ivoire. French literary critic Charles Augustin Sante-Beuve appears to have been the first to use the term in this sense. In an 1837 poem he criticizes the Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny as remaining isolated in an ivory tower, as opposed to the socially engaged Victor Hugo, who was active in contemporary French politics, and Dante, who was active in Florentine politics during his lifetime:

                               Hugo, dur partisan,
Comme chez Dante on voit , Florentin ou Pisan,
Un baron féodal, combattit sous l'armure,
Et tint haut sa bannière au milieu du murmure:
Il la maintient encore; et Vigny, plus secret,
Comme en sa tour d'ivoire, avant midi, rentrait.

(                              Hugo, a hard partisan,
As we see with Dante, Florentine or Pisan,
A feudal baron, fought under armor,
And held high his banner amid the rumbling:
He still maintains it; and Vigny, more secretive,
As if in his ivory tower, before midday, returned.)

English use of this new French sense appears at the turn of the twentieth century, from an article on poetry by Francis Gummere published in October 1903:

The modern poet addresses a disintegrated throng; he appeals to that compound of thought and emotion which sunders itself from the mass of men, and returns to the sense of communal sympathy only upon the broadly human lines of a common fate. He has withdrawn from the crowd into his "ivory tower;" but he looks out on a world instead of a village green. He works alternately with microscope and telescope; you may see what he sees with either, but you must come singly into his tower.

But it was the unfinished and posthumously published 1917 novel The Ivory Tower by Henry James that really gave a boost to the use of the term:

There it was waiting for you. Isn’t it an ivory tower, and doesn’t living in an ivory tower just mean the most distinguished retirement? I don’t want yet awhile to settle in one myself—though I’ve always thought it a thing I should like to come to; but till I do make acquaintance with what you have for me a retreat for the mystery is pleasant to think of.

And ever since, scholars have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of living in them.

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Sources:

Gummere, Francis B. “Primitive Poetry and the Ballad.” Modern Philology, 1.2, October 1903, 3–4. HathTrust Digital Archive.

James, Henry. The Ivory Tower. London: W. Collins Sons, 1917, 142–43. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ivory tower, n.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. “A.M. Villemain.” Pensées d'Aout, third edition Brussels: Société Belge de librairie, 1838, 179. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: The Morgan Library and Museum. New York, Morgan Library MS G.5, fol. 18v. Public domain in the United States as a mechanical reproduction of a work of art that was produced before 1925.

Indian summer

New England autumnal foliage, trees with brightly colored leaves lining the shore of a lake

16 February 2021

Indian summer is a name for a deceptive period of fair, warm weather in late autumn, often after the first frost. It is deceptive because it hides the fact that winter is about to begin. And the origins of the phrase are similarly cloaked in mystery. Not only are we unsure of the metaphor that underlies the phrase, but date of the earliest written use is also in doubt.

The term Indian summer is not exactly derogatory, but it is one of many terms, tropes, and euphemisms that present and reinforce a European perspective on indigenous culture, such as on the warpath, circle the wagons, and going off the reservation. As such its use should be avoided.

The most probable explanation for the name is that it reflects a European sense that native North American culture is different, false, or even ersatz. The Oxford English Dictionary points to the terms Indian corn (maize) and Indian bread (corn bread), both of which are different from the European equivalents.

Other suggestions include that it was period of hunting and harvest for Native Americans or that the good weather following the harvest was the optimal period for waging war.

Like its origin, the earliest use of the term is also in doubt. The early evidence indicates that Indian summer, like most phrases, was in widespread oral circulation before being written down.

The earliest known written use is by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (born Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur), a French settler in New York. In the late eighteenth century he wrote a series of letters and essays about his life in America, and in one he used the phrase Indian summer. He wrote in English, but the manuscript, which survives, is undated, and the original English version of this particular essay was not published until 1925. De Crèvecœur, however, also translated his writing into his native French, and this version was published in Paris in 1784. That French edition gives the date of the essay as 17 January 1774, but a later 1787 edition gives the year as 1778. The editor of the 1925 English edition of his works notes that de Crèvecœur was rather sloppy about his dates, so we can’t be sure exactly when this particular essay was written. The Oxford English Dictionary very conservatively gives the date of de Crèvecœur’s essay as being before 1813, the date of his death, but I think we can confidently conclude that it was written sometime in the 1770s and without doubt before 1784.

His original English version, as published in 1925, reads:

Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer. This is in general the invariable rule: winter is not said properly to begin until these few moderate days and the rising of the waters have announced it to Man.

The relevant passage in the French version of the essay, Description d’Une Chute de Neige, uses the phrase l’Eté Sauvage, and reads:

Quelquefois après cette pluie, il arrive un intervalle de calme & de chaleur, appelé l’Eté Sauvage; ce qui l’indique, c’est la tranquillité de l’atmosphere, & une apparence générale de fumée.

(Sometimes after this rain, there comes an interval of calm and heat, called the Indian summer, indicated by the tranquility of the atmosphere and a general appearance of smoke.)

Indian summer appears in British writing by 1786, indicating that the term had become well-established in North America before this date (more evidence that it was probably in wide circulation in the 1770s). It appears in a poem in the County Magazine of July of that year:

Sad thoughts, adieu! and let me turn my way,
Thro’ the wide plain, and devious thicket stray,
And when by grateful weariness oppress’d,
In yon cool dell, unseen by mortal rest,
Hid from the glaring sun’s descending beams,
And almost musing to the verge of dreams,
While tuneful Thomson and the Mantuan swain,
Exalt the prospect by the rural strain:
And while the bards, before my fancy bring
The Indian summer, and Italian spring,
Rapt let me mark the different climates found,
In TEMPLE’s gardens, and his lawns abound.

Because the OED gives a late date for de Crèvecœur’s essay, the earliest citation in that dictionary is from American Brigadier General Josiah Harmer’s journal for 21 October 1790. Harmer was campaigning in Ohio during the Northwest Indian War and wrote:

Thursday, Octr. 21st—Fine weather—Indian summer. Having completed the destruction of the Maumee Towns (as they are called), we took up our line of march this morning from the ruins of Chillicothy for Ft. Washington. Marched about 8 miles—detached Major Wyllys with 60 Federal & about 300 militia back to where we left this morning, in hopes he may fall in with some of the savages.

This last might seem to lend support for the idea that Indian summer was the optimal period for war, but it reverses the roles, making it the optimal period for warfare against and genocide of the indigenous population.

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Sources:

de Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John. “A Snow Storm as it Affects the American Farmer.” Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: Letters From an American Farmer. New Haven: Yale UP, 1925, 41. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

de Crèvecœur, Michel Guillaume Jean. “Description d’Une Chute de Neige” (17 January 1774?). Lettres d’un Cultivateur Américain, vol. 1.” Paris: Cuchet, 1784, 266. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Harmer, Josiah. “General Harmar’s Journal” (1790). In Basil Meek. “General Harmar’s Expedition.” Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly, 20.1, January 1911, 92–93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. Indian summer, n.

Penton, John. “Sweet Scenes, That Rich with Various Beauties Poor.” The County Magazine, 7.1, July 1786, 100. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of ‘Indian Summer’ and French ‘L’ Été Sauvage.’” Wordhistories.net, 21 June 2016.

Photo credit: Werner Kunz, 2 November 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Indian giver

1617 engraving of Ralph Hamer, secretary of the Virginia colony, and party meeting with Wahunsenacawh, father of Matoaka (a.k.a. Pocahontas) and leader of the Powhatan, an alliance of Algonquian-speaking peoples living in the Tidewater region of Virginia

15 February 2021

Indian-giver is a racist label for someone who gives a gift and then demands it be given back. Nowadays, its use is chiefly confined to children and the playground. The origin of the term is in the gift economy practiced by many North American indigenous peoples, who as a way of barter would engage in rituals of gift giving, expecting a gift of equivalent value to be given in return.

The term Indian gift is recorded in John Callender’s 1739 Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode-Island. But even in this earliest use, there is a hint of disapproval by Europeans of the practice:

And in another Manuscript he [Roger Williams] tells us, the Indians were very shy and jealous of selling the Lands to any, and chose rather to make a Grant of them to such as they affected, but at the same Time, expected such Gratuities and Rewards as made an Indian Gift often times a very dear Bargain.

By the mid eighteenth century, Indian gift was an established expression referring to the Native American practice. Thomas Hutchinson, in his 1764 History of the Colony of Massachusets-Bay [sic], writes:

The principle or persuasion that all things ought to be in common might cause hospitality, where the like was expected in return, without any great degree of virtue.

To which he appends a note:

An Indian gift is a proverbial expression, signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.

But by the early nineteenth century, the recognition that the practice was a different type of economy was beginning to fade, and in the eyes of Europeans the practice took on the connotation of duplicity and untrustworthiness. This extended passage from Washington Irving’s 1837 Adventures of Captain Bonneville, while it acknowledges the cultural difference at first, places the term Indian giving in the context of supposed Native American duplicity:

So saying, he made a signal, and forthwith a beautiful young horse, of a brown colour, was led prancing and snorting, to the place. Captain Bonneville was suitably affected by this mark of friendship; but his experience in what is proverbially called “Indian giving," made him aware that a parting pledge was necessary on his own part, to prove that this friendship was reciprocated. He accordingly placed a handsome rifle in the hands of the venerable chief; whose benevolent heart was evidently touched and gratified by this outward and visible sign of amity.

The worthy captain having now, as he thought, balanced this little account of friendship, was about to shift his saddle to this noble gift-horse when the affectionate patriarch plucked him by the sleeve and introduced to him a whimpering whining, leathern-skinned old squaw, that might have passed for an Egyptian mummy, without drying. “This,” said he, “is my wife; she is a good wife—I love her very much.—She loves the horse—she loves him a great deal—she will cry very much at losing him.—I do not know how I shall comfort her—and that makes my heart very sore.”

What could the worthy captain do, to console the tender-hearted old squaw; and, peradventure, to save the venerable patriarch from a curtain lecture? He bethought himself of a pair of earbobs: it was true, the patriarch's better-half was of an age and appearance that seemed to put personal vanity out of the question: but when is personal vanity extinct? The moment he produced the glittering earbobs, the whimpering and whining of the sempiternal beldame was at an end. She eagerly placed the precious baubles in her ears, and, though as ugly as the Witch of Endor, went off with a sideling gait, and coquettish air, as though she had been a perfect Semiramis.

The captain had now saddled his newly acquired steed, and his foot was in the stirrup, when the affectionate patriarch again stepped forward, and presented to him a young Pierced-nose, who had a peculiarly sulky look.

“This," said the venerable chief, “is my son; he is very good; a great horseman—he always took care of this very fine horse—he brought him up from a colt, and made him what he is.—He is very fond of this fine horse—he loves him like a brother—his heart will be very heavy when this fine horse leaves the camp." What could the captain do, to reward the youthful hope of this venerable pair, and comfort him for the loss of his fosterbrother, the horse? He bethought him of a hatchet, which might be spared from his slender stores. No sooner did he place the implement in the hands of young hopeful, than his countenance brightened up, and he went off rejoicing in his hatchet, to the full as much as did his respectable mother in her earbobs.

The captain was now in the saddle, and about to start, when the affectionate old patriarch stepped forward for the third time, and, while he laid one hand gently on the mane of the horse, held up the rifle in the other.

“This rifle,” said he, “shall be my great medicine. I will hug it to my heart—I will always love it, for the sake of my good friend, the bald-headed chief.—But a rifle, by itself, is dumb—I cannot make it speak. If I had a little powder and ball, I would take it out with me, and would now and then shoot a deer: and when I brought the meat home to my hungry family, I would say—this was killed by the rifle of my friend, the bald-headed chief, to whom I gave that very fine horse."

There was no resisting this appeal: the captain, forthwith, furnished the coveted supply of powder and ball; but at the same time, put spurs to his very fine gift-horse, and the first trial of his speed was to get out of all further manifestation of friendship, on the part of the affectionate old patriarch and his insinuating family.

And just the next year, the New-York Mirror includes an article about children’s culture that uses Indian giver. But here, not only has the meaning shifted from an exchange to a demand for return, but it is being used as an insult. From the 23 June 1838 issue:

A schoolboy has a character to gain as well as a solider or a statesman. Among them are distinct species of crimes and virtues. I have seen the finger pointed at the Indian giver. (One who gives a present and demands it back again.) I have heard hiss follow the tell-tale. And what shouts of bitter scorn are raised against the “fellow” who “won’t fight” or the bully who backs out at the moment of danger.

So, in a little more than a century, Indian gift had gone from the disapproving label for a Native American cultural practice to the children’s slur Indian giver.

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Sources:

Callender, John. An Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode-Island. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1739, 31–32. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“Children and their Concerns.” New-York Mirror, 15.52, 23 June 1838, 413. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. Indian, adj.

Hutchinson, Thomas. The History of the Colony of Massachusets-Bay [sic]. Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1764, 469. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Irving, Washington. Adventures of Captain Bonneville, or Scenes Beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West, vol. 2 of 3. London: Richard Bentley, 1837, 245–49. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. Indian, adj. and n.

Image credit: Georg Keller, 1617, University of Virginia Special Collections.