kitty-corner / catty-corner / catercorner

Kitty-corner? A cat (Erik) sitting in a corner by a feline water fountain

25 March 2021

Kitty-corner is a good example of folk etymology, that is the altering of unfamiliar elements of a word to ones that seem to make more sense. It comes from catercorner, and the unfamiliar cater- becomes kitty- or catty-. But the word has nothing to do with felines. Cater is a borrowing of the French quatre, meaning four, and catercornered literally means four-cornered and denotes a diagonal direction or oblique angle.

According to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), the variant kitty-corner is common across the North, Midland, and West of the United States, while catty-corner is more likely to be found in the South and South Midland.

Catercornered appears in the sixteenth century, in a translation of a fourteenth-century medical text by Lanfranco of Milan:

And of these muscles of the belly, are .viii. as I sayde before, of the whyche there be .ii. that come downe straighte a longest the bellye, hauinge their begynninge at the sharpe gristle, or shielde of the brest, and ende at the bones aboue the priuy members called Ossa pectinis: and therfore are called Musculi recti. Then ther are other two fixed to the rydge whyche goe transuers from the sydes, crosse the bredthe of the bellye: and therfore are called Musculi transuersi, or Laterales. Then are there .iiii. that are called Musculi obliqui: of the which there are .ii. that are called Obliqui ascendentes, because they spreade as it were cater cornered vpwarde: and the other ii. are called Obliqui descendentes, because they crosse slope wise, the other .ii. cater cornered downwardes.

And we see it in another text, the 1655 Natura exenterata (Nature Laid Open), which is again primarily a medical text but which also contains commentary on other useful arts, in this case sewing:

Provided alwayes if your work go true, you have three long stitches of an even length. And so your work is made an end, for there is but three courses in al the work besides the plain course. You must take heed at the beginning of your work, that you set one Skallop shel right against another, a Dyamond right against another, and so you may make the work of the double Dyamond as you do this in every point, saving at the beginning of your work you must set your Diamond-over-thwart your work, cater corner, if it be wrought with a great pinne it is the better.

The folk etymologizing of cater- into kitty- and catty- happens in the United States during the nineteenth century. We see catty-cornered in 1838 in the writing of Joseph C. Neal, a humorist who was something of a precursor to Mark Twain in style:

Of crooked disciples, Jacob Grigsby is the crookedest. His disposition is twisted like a ram's horn, and none can tell in what direction will be the next turn. He is an independent abstraction—one of that class, who do not seem aware that any feelings are to be consulted but their own, and who take the last bit, as if unconscious that it is consecrated to that useful divinity “manners;” lads, who always run in first when the bell rings, and cannot get their boots off when any body tumbles overboard; who, when compelled to share their bed with another, lie in that engrossing posture called “catty-cornered,” and when obliged to rise early, whistle, sing and dance, that none may enjoy the slumbers denied to them;—in short, he strongly resembles that engaging species of the human kind, who think it creditable to talk loud at theatres and concerts, and to encore songs and concertos which nobody else wants to hear.

On the page of the edition I consulted, catty-cornered is split at a line break, so it is unclear whether the word would normally have a hyphen or not.

And we get kitty-cornered a decade later in a 1 June 1848 from a Prudence Nicely (probably not her real name, and possibly not a real person) to the Ladies Repository magazine in which she critiques the housekeeping skills of the minister’s wife:

My soul, what a higgly piggly mess was the “best room” that morning! The bed clothes formed a pyramid, the pillows lay all crumpled and twisted, the wash-bowl full of awful suds, great spots of varnish removed by the soap laid on the mahogany, instead of in the cup-plate, the towels rolled up as for a duster, the comb and brush full of straggling hair, (nobody wanted a lock of his hair) the white muslin curtains tucked up any way and wet by the shower that stained them, and the chairs standing kitty-cornered in the middle of the floor. I couldn’t help pitying that “brother’s” wife, and thanking my stars that such pesky carelessness does not come over to our house.

And by 1872, grammarians are criticizing the use of the “abominable” catty cornered and kitty cornered, indicating that these variants were in common enough use to be called out for correction. In that year grammar scold L. P. Meredith denigrated the use of those variants in his Every-Day Errors of Speech. Meredith was one in a long line of grammar pedants who have no formal training or expertise in language. He was, rather, a physician and dentist. His other major work was The Teeth, and How to Save Them:

Cater-cornered — kāˊter-cor-nered, not kătˊty-cor-nered. Not down, thus compounded in Webster, but his pronunciation of the separate words is as given. Worcester gives the word as above and defines it as an adjective — diagonal. It is generally used though, I believe, as an adverb; as, "the piano stands cater-cornered" (diagonally). It is regarded as an inelegant word, diagonal and diagonally being preferred: though it is probable that this opinion has been caused by the abominable pronunciations catty and kitty cornered.

Catty-cornered also developed the sense of ill-tempered, which can be found in the southern United States, the same metaphor that underlies the more standard cross, meaning angry. Lydia Wood Baldwin’s 1884 Yankee School-Teacher in Virginia has this bit dialogue ascribed to a Black man, a racist use of Black dialect to elicit laughs:

"She am de catty-corneres sort ob beast dat eber I wur ’flicted ter own, dat she am," began Uncle Ned, with a grieved expression on his wrinkled face, which provoked another round of laughter. As if seeking to interrupt the recital of her misdeeds, the mule suddenly started at full speed along the highway, jerking her master indecorously backward.

Kitty-cornered or catty-cornered shouldn’t be considered “errors” today, but they are colloquialisms, with cater-cornered preferred in formal writing.

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Sources:

Baldwin, Lydia Wood. Yankee School-Teacher in Virginia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1884, 177. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. catercorner, adj., adv., kitty-corner, adv., adj.

Lanfranco of Milan. A Most Excellent and Learned Worke of Chirurgerie. John Halle, trans. London: Thomas Marshe, 1565, 76–77. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Letter from Miss Nicely” (1 June 1848). The Ladies’ Repository, vol. 17. Boston: A Tompkins, 1849, 21. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Meredith, L. P. Every-Day Errors of Speech. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Natura exenterata: or Nature Unbowelled by the Most Exquisite Anatomizers of Her. London: H Twiford, 1655, 408. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Neal, Joseph C. Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis, second edition. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1838, 196. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cater-cornered, adv. and adj., cater, v.2, cornered, adj.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2019.

kit and caboodle

Passage from a 956 C.E. charter that uses the word cytweras (basket-weirs) in an inventory of the property owned by the abbey at Bath, England

24 March 2021

Kit and caboodle is an American slang phrase meaning all, the entirety of something. The constituent elements, however, make little sense to the present-day ear. We know kit as a collection of gear or equipment, but that makes little sense in this context. And caboodle sounds like a nonsense word. But the history of the phrase is one of gradual accretion of elements going back over a thousand years.

Kit dates back to Old English. The word *cyt meaning a basket or container probably existed but isn’t recorded in the surviving record. But the compound cytwer, meaning a dam, weir, or barrier fitted with baskets for catching fish is recorded. We see it in a 956 C.E. charter granting land to the abbey at Bath:

On Dyddanhamme synd . xxx . hida — . ix . inlandes & . xxi hida gesettes landes. To Stræt synd . xii . hida . xxvii . gyrda gafollandes . & on Sæuerne . xxx . cytweras.

(In Tidenham there are 30 hides—9 of estate land & 21 hides of tenanted land. At Stroat there are 12 hides [including] 27 gyrds of leased land—and on the Severn River are 30 basket-weirs.)

Hide and gyrd are measures of land, the exact size varying with the locality. A hide would be large enough to support a single household, typically about 120 acres or 12 hectares, and a gyrd was one fourth of a hide, about 30 acres or 3 hectares.

Kit in the sense of a barrel or other container dates to at least 1362, when it appears in an inventory of property belonging to the monastery at Jarrow-Monkwearmouth:

Item in bracina sunt ij. plumba, j. maskfatt cum pertinentiis, iiij. gilfattes quarum ij. novæ et ij. veteres, iij. fattes debiles, iij. tubbes, ij. tynæ, j. bona et alia debilis, ij. melfattes, j. temes nova, iij. bulteclathes bonæ, j. melsyf, xj. barelli pro servisia, ij. troues pro servisia conservanda, iij. meles bonæ, ij. wortdisses bonæ, ij. collokes et j. kytt pro vaccis mulgendis, j. kyrne, j. furgum de ferro, j. colrake de ferro bonum.

(Item. In the kitchen are 2 lead vessels; 1 mash vat with related items; 4 wort vats of which 2 are new and 2 old; 3 poor-quality vats; 3 tubs; 2 tins, 1 good and the other bad; 2 honey vats; 1 new sieve; 3 good sifting cloths, 1 honey sieve, 11 barrels for beer, 2 vessels for preserving beer, 3 good containers, 2 good wort dishes, 2 tankards and 1 kit for cow’s milk, 1 churn, 1 poker for the fire, 1 good ash-rake for the fire.)

The meaning of kit eventually transferred over to the contents of the container. Much like we might say a “barrel of ___” or a “passel of ___,” one might say a “kit of ____.” And by 1784 we see the phrase the whole kit, meaning the entirety of something, the entire group. From James Hartley’s The History of the Westminster Election of that year:

I saw the constables all bear down in a full body from Wood's Hotel, which is King-street end [sic] of the Hustings down to the pump; when they came to the pump, I was standing facing the spot, and there came a head constable with the whole kit of the constables, each had a black staff with silver tipped at each end, and a crown at top; it was about two feet long, I was standing there, and if I had not moved I should have been knocked down by it.

And the early slang lexicographer Francis Grose recorded it in his 1785 A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, although he got the etymology wrong:

KIT, a dancing master, so called from his kit, or cittern, (a small fiddle) which dancing masters always carry about with them, to play to their scholars; the kit, is likewise the whole of a soldier's necessaries, the content of his knapsack, and is used also to express the whole of different commodities; here take the whole kit, i.e. take all.

And there is this article about an assault on and alleged robbery of a Jewish watch salesman from 1798. Not only does it show the use of the whole kit, it is also indicative of antisemitism prevalent in Britain at the time:

The Magistrates took much pains to develope this mysterious affair, and were of the opinion that there was no intention of robbery, and in fact, it was doubtful if any watch was lost; but of the assault they had no doubt, and bound them to that only, which made Shylock vehemently exclaim at the Office door—“Who is to pay me for my Vatch? Oh! my poor Vatch, d—n mine eyes if I don’t get payment for mine Vatch, but I will indict the whole kit of you!”

Boodle, on the other hand, makes a later appearance than kit. It’s a borrowing of the Dutch boedel, meaning the moveable goods of a person or a heap or disordered collection of things. It makes an appearance in the seventeenth century, but that seems to be an isolated or short-lived borrowing. From Francis Markham’s 1625 The Book of Honour:

And questionlesse, there are most infallible Reasons, why extraordinary respect should be giuen to this place of Embassador, both in regard of their election, being men curiously and carefully chosen out (from all the Buddle, and masse of great ones) for their aprooued wisedome, and experience.

The word was apparently reborrowed into American English in the early nineteenth century. The editors of the New Hampshire Patriot published this New Year’s poem on 4 January 1814 recounting the events of the past year. One stanza represents the Federalist Party’s sweeping of state and federal offices, driving out Democratic-Republican office holders. Concord is the state capital:

The Junto defeated, from Concord retreated,
The Governor too with his old cock up hat,
While the loud execration of both State and nation,
Pursu’d the whole boodle on this side and that.

And in an 18 July 1827 letter, humorist George W. Arnold, writing in the voice of a character named Joe Strickland, had this to say:

Then he dug under ground un got intu the Phultun banck, un turnd out the hol boodle ov um, got awl the munny, un then lafft at um, the loryars awl the tyme drivin at him, but tha koud’nt get hold on him—he waz jist like Padda’s Phlee, kase when tha put ther finger on him he was’nt there.

At some point the ca- was added to boodle, perhaps for emphasis and because of the old comic truism that words that begin with /k/ are inherently funny. We see the whole caboodle in an April 1839 account of the trial of Alexander Stewart (the prisoner) for conspiracy to kidnap Canadian terrorist Benjamin Lett, who had taken refuge in the United States, and return him to Canada. Stewart was accused of being a spy for Canada, and his associate was James Sparks:

Witness continued—To get Lett across Sparks proposed to get him drunk—to mix laudanum with his liquor—or knock him down—saw nothing prepared for the purpose—got half a gallon of rum for his (witness’s) own use. If witness had gone into the plan a part of the rum might have been used—told Lett not to drink with prisoner and Sparks at any time. Witness saw a letter from Gov. Arthur’s son to the prisoner, which stated that a reward of $4000 would be given for his delivery in Canada.

(Prisoner—Bob! I’ll tell you the whole caboodle of the scrape! I am willing to act as a witness. I don’t care a damn! Put me as a witness if you like.)

Ten years later, on 31 March 1849 the Vermont newspaper The State Banner combined the two in the whole kit and boodle in an article about politician Horace Greeley. The rhetoric of the article should be familiar to those familiar with American politics today:

Horace Greely, when the whole kit and boodle of the honorable thieves in Congress turned upon him, and branded him as no gentlemen [sic], owned up in the following Ben Franklin style. Well done, Horace!

“I know very well—I knew from the first what a low, contemptible, demagoguing business this of attempting to save public money always is. It is not a task for gentlemen—it is esteemed rather disreputable for editors. Your gentlemanly work is spending—lavishing—distributing—taking. Savings are always such vulgar, beggarly, two-penny affairs—there is a sorry and stingy look about them most repugnant to all gentlemanly instincts. And besides they never happen to hit the right place, it is always ‘strike higher!’ ‘strike lower!’—to be generous with other people’s money—generous to self and friends especially, that is the way to be popular and commending. Go ahead, and never care for expense!—if your debts become inconvenient you can repudiate and blackguard your creditors as descended from Judas Iscariot! Ah! Mr Chairman, I was not rocked in the cradle of gentility!”

Finally, by 1870 we seen the complete phrase the whole kit and caboodle in Henry Stiles’s 1870 History of the City of Brooklyn:

A line of stages, it was true, pretended (as it had, for several years), to keep up the connection between the two points; but it was managed in the most irregular manner. Poor stages, and poorer horses; easy drivers, who deviated from the route, hither or thither, obedient to the call of a handkerchief fluttering from a window blind, or the " halloo!" of a passenger anywhere in sight. Mr. Queen, therefore, purchased the entire "kit and caboodle" of the stage company; put on entirely new conveyances, horses, and equipments, and started what he intended should be an omnibus line to Bedford, running regularly, on a carefully arranged time table

A rather long path from early medieval fishing weirs on the Severn river.

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Sources:

“Bounds and Customs of Tidenham, Glous.” (Sawyer 1555). The Electronic Sawyer. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 111.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, cyt-wer.

“Editor’s New Year’s Address” (1 January 1814) New Hampshire Patriot (Concord), 4 January 1814, 4. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. whole kit, n.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hartley, James. The History of the Westminster Election. London: 1784, 403. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Inventories and Account Rolls of the Benedictine Houses or Cells of Jarrow and Monk-Wearmouth. Publications of the Surtees Society, 29. Durham: George Andrews, 1854, 159. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mackenzie, James. “British Spies Unmasked!!” Mackenzie’s Gazette (Rochester, New York), 20 April 1839, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Markham, Francis. “The Argument of Embassadors.” The Book of Honour. London: Augustine Matthewes and John Norton, 1625, 125. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. kit(te, n.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. boodle, n.1; second edition, 1989, s.v. caboodle, n., kit, n.1.

“Police Offices.” Oracle, and the Daily Advertiser (London), 27 October 1798, 7. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

The State Banner (East Bennington, Vermont), 31 March 1849, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Stiles, Henry R. A History of the City of Brooklyn, vol. 3 of 3. Brooklyn: 1870, 569. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Strickland, Joe (pseudonym of George W. Arnold). Letter (18 July 1827). In Allen Walker Read, “The World of Joe Strickland.” Journal of American Folklore, 76.302, October–December 1963, 289. JSTOR.

Image credit: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 111: The Bath Cartulary and related items, Parker on the Web, p. 72.

this is a Wendy's

A pair of tweets from 22 July 2018 in which U.S. President Donald Trump threatens Iran and to which an ordinary Twitter user replies, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s drive-thru.”

23 March 2021

This is a Wendy’s is a joke commonly found on Twitter and other social media platforms. It’s used as reply to a rant or controversial comment. It is a reference to the Wendy’s fast-food chain and implies that the forum isn’t an appropriate one for that rant or comment. The use of the phrase on social media is a succinct illustration of how comedic lines from movies or television can become memes and the difference between regular tweets and those that go viral.

The phrase originated on an episode of the U.S. version of The Office television series that originally aired on 17 April 2008. The character of Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell, is trying to find a particular woman he has seen and is enamored with, and his co-worker Kevin has given him a phone number that is purportedly hers.

The Wendy’s chain, named after the daughter of its founder, has as its icon the image of a freckled, red-haired girl in pigtails, and promotes its “hot and juicy” hamburgers:

Michael Scott:            Okay. Wendy. "Hot and juicy redhead." I'll give this a try. [dials number]

Woman:                      Wendy.

Michael Scott:            Hello, Wendy. This is Kevin's friend, Michael.

Woman:                     This isn't Wendy.

Michael Scott:            Oh, I'm sorry could you put her on please?

Woman:                      Dude, this is a Wendy's restaurant.

Michael Scott:            [mutters] Damn it, Kevin.

It was quickly turned into a joke on Twitter. Just a week later on 24 April 2008, this tweet appeared, the first such tweet that did not directly reference the television episode. The tweeter was making a self-deprecating joke, and the “ego storm” refers to the fact that he has been having a day when everything has been going right for him. In early use, the phrase was often so deployed by the original poster, indicating self-awareness of their own unreasonableness:

Emergency call to Dominos to quell the ego storm: "I need a humble pie!" "What?!" "It's a joke!" "I get it, sir, but this is a Wendy's."

The joke would be repeated on Twitter sporadically until 2012, when it started taking off, with the number of people making the joke growing steadily. It just so happens that 2012 was when the Netflix video service started streaming episodes of The Office. The on-demand availability of the episode kept the joke fresh in people’s minds.

These early repetitions of the joke were almost all in the context of embarrassing incidents, mostly presumably fictional, involving dialing wrong phone numbers or obliviously trying to order something not available at a Wendy’s.

But around 2016, the line this is a Wendy’s began to be used as a reply to rants or controversial statements. An early example is this tweet from 29 September 2016 (it’s not necessarily the first, as it’s often difficult to determine the context in which a particular tweet has been made):

Trump: [leans into microphone] Doing illegal business deals in Cuba means I’m *smart*.

Drive-through clerk: This is a Wendy’s, Mr. Trump.

And we have this tweet from 7 December 2016 about football coach Matt Rhule leaving Temple University for Baylor University:

Me: I'm happy for Coach Rhule and I expected him to leave at some point, but Baylor? Why? I don't get it.

Cashier: Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Neither of these are actual replies to another’s tweet. That happens on 25 August 2017 when @GaryCMiller2 replied to a tweet by @LordeCelsius. The context is that of Hillary Clinton and the 2016 U.S. presidential election:

Yeah, we should have went [sic] the "witch" who was so smart she "didn't know" that it was wrong to send classified emails by public server.

To which @LordeCelsius replied:

sir this is a Wendy's drive-thru

None of these early examples garnered much notice. The joke was widespread and understood by many, but it had not gone viral.

That would change on 22 July 2018. At 11:24pm on that Sunday night, President Donald Trump, seemingly without provocation, tweeted the following:

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

The tweet rattled many, who were afraid of the potential fallout from such bellicose words from a U.S. president. But unperturbed, Ben Yelin, @byelin, an ordinary Twitter user, replied to Trump:

Sir, this is a Wendy’s drive-thru.

Yelin’s reply went viral, putting a humorous face on a scary situation. It garnered over 15,000 retweets and over 80,000 likes by the next day, and the exchange was reported in major media outlets.

The phrase is an excellent example of how a joke from an old television show can percolate for years before bursting into public consciousness as the result of a combination of continued availability from on-demand streaming and its being deployed in a very apt situation.

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Sources:

@byelin. Twitter, 22 July 2018.

@fuzzytypewriter. Twitter, 24 April 2008.

@GaryCMiller2. Twitter, 25 August 2017.

@Jallen_Town. Twitter, 7 December 2016.

@LordeCelsius. Twitter, 25 August 2017.

@Moltz, Twitter. 29 September 2016.

@realDonaldTrump (suspended account), Twitter, 22 July 2018. Trump Twitter Archive V2.

“Mediaite: Trump's Explosive Late-Night, All-Caps Threat to Iran Melts Down Twitter: 'DEFCON 2'” Newstex Trade & Industry Blogs, 23 July 2018. ProQuest: Blogs, Podcasts, and Websites.

Novak, B. J. “Chair Model.” The Office (U.S. TV series), airdate 17 April 2008. Deedle-Dee Productions. IMDb.com.

Kilroy was here / Mr. Chad

An engraving of the Kilroy was here graffito on the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC. In the graffito, the phrase Kilroy was here is placed alongside the sketch of a man peering over a wall that originated as the British Mr. Chad.

22 March 2021

In the 1940s, Kilroy was here was a phrase scrawled on walls, vehicles, and other pieces of equipment around the world, from French villages to Pacific atolls, wherever American service men and women were stationed during World War II. Kilroy was something of a Scarlet Pimpernel, appearing everywhere and nowhere at the same time. At some point, perhaps after the war, Kilroy started appearing alongside the drawing of his British counterpart Mr. Chad.

The first citation of Kilroy was here in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Saturday Evening Post of 20 October 1945. While it is not the first appearance of the phrase in print, it does give an excellent description of the ubiquity of the graffito:

When an Army Air Forces lieutenant entered the bedroom of a furnished house in Long Beach, California, which the Army’s 6th Ferrying Group had rented for him, he saw a baby’s crib. On the crib hung a hand-lettered sign which asserted: KILROY SLEPT HERE. “Well,” said the lieutenant softly, “I’ll be damned.”

With this comment about the Army Air Forces’ celebrated man of mystery, the flier was repeating himself. He had made a similar comment after landing in Accra, Africa, after hopping the Atlantic from Natal, and again at Karachi, India, and still again when he arrived in China on his first flight over the Hump from the Mohanbari airfield in Assam.

In those faraway places messages from Kilroy had greeted him, not on a baby’s crib but from the walls of rooms and the doors of hangars and from all manner of other strange places wehre a communication could be written or hung. In Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, on islands all over the Pacific, he had read the record of the man who had been everywhere and, apparently, invariably had been there first. Wherever he was, Kilroy had been there and left his mark behind: KILROY WAS HERE, or KILROY PASSED THROUGH, or YOU’RE IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF KILROY.

In his diary entry for 5 September 1945, Major Ben Kaplan, one of the first Americans to arrive in Japan after the surrender, has this account of how fast the graffito appeared in that country and of the various places he had seen it during his wartime service:

A sign on one of the hangars: “Kilroy was Here.” This was the first I’ve seen in Japan, but Kilroy is a mythical character one is likely to meet anywhere in the world. Don’t know who “invented” the gag, but one sees the signs, or scrawlings everywhere. Sometimes it’s “Kilroy Slept Here,” or variations thereof; “Kilroy’s Island—Discovered by Kilroy”; “Kilroy Doesn't Live Here Anymore.” In Bengazi [sic] once I saw a sign which read: “Kilroy’s Home Town.” There was an oversized “Kilroy Kurrency” note under a glass desktop at Hickam Field, Hawaii, when we passed through there.

The phrase probably originated c. 1943 by some anonymous serviceman, but the earliest use in print that I’m aware of is from the air base newspaper Sheppard Field Texacts on 21 April 1945:

Who is Kilroy? What a one man campaign! He seems destined to go down in history along with Foo and Novschmozkapop as a family by word.

Roger Angell, who later became famous as an essayist, baseball writer, and fiction editor for the New Yorker, wrote the following on 26 June 1945 in Brief, a publication of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Pacific Ocean Areas:

Who is Kilroy?

Kilroy is the guy who just stepped out of the orderly room as you came in. Kilroy was in the latrine, but he left before you got there. He was in your messhall, but didn’t like the food and left before you showed up. He’s the tail gunner that doesn’t answer when you call him on the intercom; he’s the character that bought the last lighter at the PX, just before you went over to buy one.

This wacky routine is the latest AAF gag, that is spreading fast from the States. Every bulletin board, officer’s club and latrine in the States has a notice up about Kilroy—the imaginary character that no one ever catches up to. Planes have been named for him, but nobody has ever seen him. Notices on bulletin boards which say to turn in laundry at 0700 also announce that Kilroy turned his in at 0645.

Kilroy, as far as we can find out, never got to the ETO. The farthest east he ever got was Jamaica. But he is on his way here from home, along with all the new pilots that are heading Pacific-ward. His latest non-appearance occurred somewhere between California and Oahu. A B-29 crew, flying out, got into a radio conversation with a ship. The radioman, just as he was about to sign off, asked the the sailor if he had seen anything of Kilroy. “Yeah,” said the sailor. “We passed a sign in the water a few miles back. It said ‘Kilroy ditched here.’”

Kilroy will be here any day, but you won’t be seeing him.

Angell was mistaken about Kilroy not making it to Europe, and there is this early use in the Seattle Times of 29 July 1945 that shows that Kilroy was not limited to the air force:

The most notorious character at Fort Lawton these days is a soldier—(or something)—named Kilroy—who isn’t there.

The one-time existence of Kilroy, who has been described as everything from an infantry private, first-class, to a white rat, is resumed from numberless chalked signs, scattered about the fort, which read:
“Kilroy slept here.”
“Kilroy drove this truck.”
“Kilroy got clipped here.” At the barber shop) [sic]
“Kilroy got the needle here.” (At the medical processing center.)

Kilroy is an uncommon—but far from unknown—surname in North America, but who the Kilroy was, if he even was a real person, is unknown. There are multiple claims as to the original Kilroy, but none can be verified. For instance, there is this 24 November 1945 story in the San Francisco Chronicle that credits an Army Airman Francis J. Kilroy with being the original:

HERE IS KILROY: Thanks to Navy Lieutenant John M. Lamb of Berkeley, Newsman Bill Walsh, one or two anonymous contributors and some one who calls himself “Pipefitter Pete,” we’re able to identify the young man who inspired, on a global scale, the appearance of all the signs reading, “Kilroy was here.” We understand he’s been identified before, but for those who, like us, came in late, here is the word on Kilroy.

In the first place, he is AAF Sergeant Francis J. Kilroy Jr., of 967 Broadway, Everett, Mass. In 1943, at the Boca Raton Army Air Field in Florida, he struck up a friendship with Sergeant James Maloney of Philadelphia. One day, Kilroy became a flu victim and was hospitalized. When he learned how soon his friend would be out of the hospital, Maloney returned to his barracks and for no good reason scrawled on the bulletin board: “Kilroy will be here next week.” A month later, Maloney and Kilroy were transferred to different fields, but the Kilroy signs appealed to Maloney, and he kept on scrawling them when he thought of it and on anything that happened to be handy. They caught on, and soon every one was doing it in various parts of the world and various theaters of war. The contagion seems to be very similar to that which followed the American Legion convention of several years ago, which had every one exclaiming, “Where’s Elmer?” for months afterward.

Anyway, to wind up the part about Kilroy, the sergeant spent 10 months in Italy with a bomb group and received a distinguished unit citation and five battle stars. As of a few weeks ago, he was awaiting discharge at Davis-Monthan field, near Tucson, and may by now be back in civilian clothes.

And a little over a year later, the New York Times of 24 December 1946 credits a shipyard inspector named James J. Kilroy with being the original:

In brief, Mr. [James J.] Kilroy’s claim is based on the following:

During the war he was employed at the Bethlehem Steel Company’s Quincy shipyard, inspecting tanks, double bottoms and other parts of warships under construction. To satisfy superiors that he was performing his duties, Mr. Kilroy scribbled in yellow crayon “Kilroy was here” on inspected work. Soon the phrase began to appear in various unrelated places, and Mr. Kilroy believes the 14,000 shipyard workers who entered the armed services were responsible for its subsequent world-wide use.

It’s possible that both are the progenitors of Kilroy was here, or perhaps neither and that it was someone else who inspired all that graffiti.

As mentioned above, the simple drawing of a man peering over a wall has been associated with Kilroy, but the drawing was originally of his British counterpart, Mr. Chad, or simply Chad. The British Mr. Chad was typically accompanied with the interrogative phrase What! No ____? or Wot! No ____? with the blank being filled by whatever happened to be in short supply that week. The origin of the name Mr. Chad is just as mysterious as Kilroy, but we can pinpoint the origin of the drawing.

The first published appearance of the figure later known as Mr. Chad in a “Useless Eustace” cartoon by Jack Greenall in the Daily Mirror, 11 December 1937. A man stands at a bank teller’s window in front of a pile of money, saying, “I don’t want to draw it out!—I was only making sure it was all there.” In the background, a Mr. Chad-like figure peers over a wall.

The drawing was created by British cartoonist and erstwhile drawing instructor Jack Greenall in the mid 1920s, early in his career when he was employed at a technical drawing school, as an exercise for his students in drawing simple forms. The figure first saw print when Greenall included the image in a Useless Eustace cartoon published in London’s Daily Mirror on 11 December 1937. The oft-included caption of “Wot! No ____?” would be added later, as commentary on wartime shortages.

Like Kilroy, the name Mr. Chad would not be documented in print until the very end of the war, but there is an intriguing London Times crossword clue for 14 July 1941. The clue reads, “The weight of Mr. Chad,” and the answer was drachm, an anagram for Mr. Chad. This crossword clue is probably just coincidence, but we cannot rule out that Mr. Chad was in oral circulation at this early date and inspired the clue.

The first unambiguous use of the name in print is in the Gloucestershire Echo of 6 September 1945:

A local member of the Association of Army Radio Mechanics, a newly-formed ex-Servicemen’s Association, Cfn. W. Cole, of 11, White Hart-street, Cheltenham, tells us that the president is the mysterious “Mr. Chad,” well known to all Army and ex-Army radio mechanics.

The first recorded appearance of Mr. Chad was when he was with the No. 2 Radio Mechanics School when this was located at Oakley Farm, Cheltenham.

The “first recorded appearance” mentioned in the article is unknown and may simply refer to someone’s recollection of having seen it at the school. But the explanation of the origin being at the radio mechanics school is probably incorrect, although one cannot completely discount the idea that Greenall’s drawing exercise from the 1920s continued to be used by other technical drafting instructors. The idea that the image stems from the Greek letter omega, the symbol for electrical resistance, or from a drawing of a simple electrical circuit would seem to be after-the-fact groping for an explanation.

Another early appearance is in The Daily Mirror of 10 September 1945:

Who is Mr. Chad? You probably don’t know, just as you didn’t know what a Gremlin was when you first heard the name. But for several years now Mr. Chad’s portrait has been appearing regularly on the walls—inside and outside—of Service huts and vehicles.

In the end, we’ll probably never know who the original Kilroy was or the name of the Tommy who first scrawled “Wot! No?” under a drawing of a man peering over a wall. In a way, it’s more appropriate that Kilroy and Mr. Chad remain mysterious. He is every soldier, sailor, and airman who served.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Angell, Roger. “File 13.” Brief, 26 June 1945, 18. Google Books.

Associated Press. “Transit Association Ships a Street Car to Shelter Family of ‘Kilroy Was Here.’” New York Times, 24 December 1946, 18. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

French, William F. “Who is Kilroy?” Saturday Evening Post, 20 October 1945, 6. EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021. s.v. chad n.

“How Mr. Chad was born.” Daily Mirror (London), 10 September 1945, 7. Gale Primary Sources: Mirror Historical Archive.

Kaplan, Ben Z. “Tojo Doesn’t Live Here Any More.” Free World, 10.6, December 1945, 36. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mahaffay, Robert. “Kilroy ‘Gets Around’ at Fort Lawton.” The Seattle Times, 29 July 1945, 14. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Mr. Chad is 20 Years Old.” Daily Mirror (London), 30 January 1946, 1. Gale Primary Sources.

O’Brien, Robert. “San Francisco.” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 November 1945, 9. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, Kilroy, n.

Shapiro, Fred. “More Precise Information on Antedating of ‘Kilroy.’” ADS-L, 1 April 2016.

“Squadron T.” Sheppard Field Texacts (Texas), 21 April 1945, 9. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Times Crossword Puzzle No. 3,552.” The Times (London), 14 July 1941, 6. Gale Primary Sources: Times Digital Archive.

“To-Day’s Gossip.” Gloucestershire Echo, 6 September 1945, 3. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Image credits: WWII Memorial engraving: Luis Rubio, 2006, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; Jack Greenall, “Useless Eustace, Daily Mirror, 11 December 1937, 8. Gale Primary Sources: Mirror Historical Archive. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate a point under discussion.

keister

19 March 2021

The slang word keister is best known to us today as meaning the buttocks or ass (or arse), but in the past, it has also meant a satchel or traveling suitcase, especially a satchel that can be secured with straps and a lock. And it could also refer to a safe or strongbox, particularly one within a larger vault. The word comes from the German Kiste, meaning box and with a slang sense of the buttocks. The German word comes from the Latin cista and is cognate with the English word chest.

The slang sense of Kiste meaning buttocks is recorded in Hans Ostwald’s Rinnsteinsprache (Gutter Speech), a slang dictionary from 1906:

Kiste. 1) Hintere, 2) Hast, 3) Geldbörse.

(Kiste. 1) the behind, 2) haste, 3) a wallet.)

This is later than keister’s appearance in English to mean a satchel, but before any known use of the word in English to mean buttocks. Older uses in German are likely to be found. (My resources on German slang are scant.) This early existence of the slang sense in German indicates the slang sense was imported into English along with the standard sense of a satchel.

How a satchel or wallet came to mean the buttocks is speculative. It may come from the idea that one can sit on one’s luggage, or it may be pickpocket slang—a man’s wallet is often carried in a rear pocket.

Keister is first recorded in English in the pages of the National Police Gazette on 1 October 1881 as the nickname of a certain confidence man. It’s not quite clear what the nickname is supposed to represent, but may have come from his being known for carrying a suitcase, perhaps because he frequently traveled for to facilitate a quick departure after the con was concluded:

Prominent among the small army of confidence operators in this city are: “Grand Central Pete” (Peter Lake), “Boston Charlie” (Ed. Foster), “The Guinea Pig” (Harry Ashton), “Smiling Charlie” (Eddie Wall), “Windy” McDermott, “Irish Mike,” John Simpson, Ike Vail, “Big Connelly, “Black Jack,” “Billy Boynton, “The Stuff,” “Keister Bob,” “The Kid,” “Hungry Joe.” Many of these men have escaped identification, and some of the are scarcely known outside of police circles.

The next year humorist George Peck uses it in his 1882 collection of stories titled Peck’s Sunshine. Here the meaning of suitcase is absolutely clear:

The clerk called a bell boy and said, "Show the gentleman to 253."

The boy took the Knight's keister and went to the elevator, the door opened and the Knight went in and began to pull off his coat, when he looked around and saw a woman on the plush upholstered seat of the elevator, leaning against the wall with her head on her hand.

The sense of a safe or strongbox is attested to in The Shadow, a 1913 novel by Canadian-American novelist Arthur Stringer:

He got to know the "habituals” and the “timers,” the "gangs” and their "hang outs” and “fences.” He acquired an array of confidence men and hotel beats and queer shovers and bank sneaks and wire tappers and drum snuffers. He made a mental record of dips and yeggs and till-tappers and keister-crackers, of panhandlers and dummy chuckers, of sun gazers and schlaum workers.

A more specific sense of safe or strong box, and one that connects this sense to the satchel/suitcase sense can be found in a glossary of criminal slang in George Henderson’s 1924 Keys to Crookdom:

Harnessed box. Safe protected by steel bars and levers across front. Also known as harnessed keister.

[...]

Keister. Bars on certain type of safe. A handbag that can be strapped and locked.

The buttocks sense is recorded by 1931 in an article on criminal slang in the journal American Speech.

keister, n. A satchel; also what one sits on.

And about the same time, we have keister appearing in a Tijuana bible, that is a palm-sized, pornographic comic book. This one is part of a series, The Adventures of a Fuller Brush Man, about the amorous encounters of a door-to-door salesman. The issue in question is #10 in the series, titled, “The Amorous Mrs. Twirp.” The comic is undated but seems to be from the early 1930s. The panel in question has a drawing of a naked man and woman copulating, with the woman on top, astride the man. The man says:

Come on—wave that kiester [sic].

But keister would work its way out of the province of criminals and pornography into general slang. By the 1950s it would appear in the mainstream humor of P. G. Wodehouse. From his 1951 novel The Old Reliable:

“I’m glad you didn't say ‘He's a good sort.’”

“Why, is that bad?”

“Fatal. It would have meant that there was no hope for him. It's what the boys used to say of me twenty years ago. ‘Oh, Bill,’ they'd say. ‘Dear old Bill. I like Bill. She's a good sort.’ And then they'd leave me flat on my keister and go off and buy candy and orchids for the other girls, blister their insides.”

“Is that why you're a solitary chip drifting down the river of life?”

“That's why. Often a bridesmaid but never a bride.”

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Adelman, Bob. Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s–1950s. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1997, 47.

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. keister, n.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. keister, n.

Henderson, George C. “Appendix B: Criminal Slang.” Keys to Crookdom. New York: D. Appleton, 1924, 407, 409. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lighter, J. E. Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 2 of 2. New York: Random House, 1997, s. v. keister, n.

“The Man-Traps of New York.” National Police Gazette, 1 October 1881, 10. ProQuest Magazines.

Milburn, George. “Convict’s Jargon.” American Speech, 6.6., August 1931, 439. JSTOR.

Ostwald, Hans. Rinnsteinsprache. Berlin: Harmonie, 1906, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Peck, George W. Peck’s Sunshine. Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1882, 227. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Stringer, Arthur. The Shadow. New York: Century, 1913. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wodehouse, P. G. The Old Reliable. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1951, 132. HathiTrust Digital Archive.