milquetoast

A 1928 installment of H.T. Webster’s The Timid Soul in which in which a bellman announces a message for Caspar Milquetoast (far right), but he is too embarrassed by his name to answer

6 May 2021

A milquetoast is a meek, mild-mannered, submissive person, usually a man. The word comes from the name of a cartoon character, H.T. Webster’s Casper Milquetoast, star of the comic The Timid Soul, which debuted in the pages of the New York World in May 1924 and was syndicated nationwide until 1953. The word is often capitalized, and in recent years, as memory of the comic has faded away, is sometimes spelled milktoast.

Milk toast is an easily digestible food and is exactly what it sounds like—toast soaked in milk. It is typically given to those who are ill or who have a “nervous stomach.” H.T. Webster clearly modeled this character’s name after the dish.

The comic debuted in 1924, and by 1930 the term started to be used outside of references to the comic. But at first, those non-comic references were in the forms Mr. Milquetoast or Caspar Milquetoast. For instance, there is this from an intriguingly titled November 1930 article “Of Course You Can’t Tell Whether It’s Your Baby”:

“My offspring might be born, say, clubfooted or harelipped: my physical soundness is no guarantee of offspring’s physical soundness. Despite clubfoot or harelip, that offspring might become a monstrous, insane criminal; or a nice gentle Mr. Milquetoast.

Or this from a Washington Post review of the movie The Royal Bed from 18 January 1931, a review that desperately needed a proofreader:

His Majesty was surrounded in his palace, and without, by a lot of bullies of various sexes. What with his over-zealous premier, hen-pecking wife, plotting revolutionists, love-sick daughter, bartered by her queenly mother on the matrimonial block, and a few shells blowing the royal establishment to smithereens, the King seemed in for a bit of in glorious abdicating until, by superb insight into the weakneses [sic] of his opponents, a keen play of with and the temerity to cease permitting his wife to be king, he turned the whole muddled business to own complacent advantage. All very buoyant, very glib and very heartening to the world’s Jasper [sic] Milquetoasts.

And there is this critique of Lionel Barrymore’s performance as Otto Kringelein in the movie Grand Hotel from the Oakland Tribune of 12 June 1932:

Each incident was conveyed with the Barrymore craft, each scene was carefully built and meticulously evolved. It was exciting to watch, but it was always Barrymore and never Kringelein.

The Kringelein was a Mister Milquetoast. For thirty years he had accepted the insults, the long hours and the short pay of his Prussian boss.

Barrymore, who won the highest prize in filmdom’s gift for making a real personage out of a phony melodramatic figure in “A Free Soul,” converting the dross of hokum into the gold of artistry by the alchemy of his art, missed Kringelein entirely.

But by 1932 we start seeing milquetoast deployed on its own and as an adjective. From the Charleston Daily Mail of 26 August 1932:

We venture another political forecast: Neither Mr. Roosevelt nor Mr. Hoover has anything to worry about in the so-called movement to write Mr. Alfred E. Smith’s name on the ballot on November 8. No states will be won or lost to the notified candidates on that account. The average voter, Old Forgotten Man, feels that he is making his great sacrifice if he spends five minutes registering and ten minutes voting. Does anybody think that he is going to go to the trouble of writing a name on the ballot, with the strong fear of authority that the Milquetoast majority has that if he does vote the straight ticket his ballot won’t be counted.

And there is this 12 February 1933 complaint in the Springfield Sunday Union and Republican about how technology has put an end to privacy:

And as if this were not enough, the broadcasting companies are sending representatives through the streets to waylay chance passers-by and coax them to broadcast extemporaneous speeches through label microphones. The victim cannot simply gasp “Hullo, Momma!” in the manner of a breathless athlete at the ringside. He must answer questions on specific subjects such as “To what extent will the small independent prune grower be affected by Schedule K of the Hoot-Smawley Tariff Act? or, “Do you approve of capital punishment for mothers guilty of infanticide—and if so, why?”

The mute, inglorious Milquetoast must be ready at a moment’s notice to offer opinions on any topic. In all his conclusions he must be quick on the draw and shoot from the hip. He is the “man in the street,” and the world wants to know what he’s thinking about.

The more things change. But at least the milquetoasts are still in line to inherit the earth.

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Sources:

Bell, Nelson B. “RKO-Keith’s.” Washington Post, 18 January 1931, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“The Conning Tower.” Charleston Daily Mail (West Virginia), 26 August 1932, 6. NewspaperArchive.com.

Dorsey, George A. “Of Course You Can’t Tell Whether It’s Your Baby.” Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan, November 1930, 116. ProQuest: Magazines.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. Caspar Milquetoast, n.

Holbrook, Weare. “Home Movie Camera Puts All in Spotlight.” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican (Massachusetts), 12 February 1933. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Milquetoast, n. and adj.; March 2021, s.v. milk, n.1 and adj.

Soanes, Wood. “Screen Adaptation of ‘Grand Hotel’ Compared with Gilding of Lily.” Oakland Tribune (California), 12 June 1932, S-5, 26. NewspaperArchive.com.

Image credit: H.T. Webster, “The Timid Soul,” The Citizen (Ottawa), 21 June 1928, 16. Fair use of an image to illustrate a topic under discussion.

doom

Image of the Last Judgment, an illumination from a thirteenth-century psalter. The image is in three tiers. At the top is Christ surrounded by angels blowing horns and saints. The middle tier depicts a sword-bearing angel dividing the people, with some (left) being led to heaven by an angel and some (right) being led to hell by a devil. The lower tier depicts Christ resurrecting the dead (left) and devils roasting people in hell (right).

5 May 2021

The word doom comes down to us from the Old English dom, although the primary meaning has shifted over the centuries. Today, doom usually means an unpleasant fate; one can be doomed to a life of loneliness, but one is hardly ever doomed to a life of bliss. But in Old English, the word simply meant a judgment, and that judgment could be either legal or divine.

For instance, the law code promulgated by King Alfred in the late ninth century has this:

Dem ðu swiðe emne. Ne dem ðu oðerne dom þan welegan, oðerne ðam earman; ne oðerne þam liofran & oðerne þam laðran ne dem ðu.

(Judge very equally. Do not pronounce one doom for the wealthy, another to the poor, not one for the beloved and another for those whom you hate.)

The verb in this passage is deman, which survives as our present-day to deem. Deman and deem have the same root as doom. But with one exception, doom was not used as a verb in Old English. That one exception is the verb domian, which only appears in the poem Daniel, a versification of a portion of that biblical book. In that context domian means to glorify God, literally to judge God in one’s heart.

And the famous Doomsday Book compiled during the reign of William the Conqueror has nothing to do with the Apocalypse; it is simply an accounting of judgments regarding who owns what in the kingdom.

But the Old English dom could also be used in the context of the end of days. From the Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, a translation that likely was done by King Alfred himself, probably with the assistance of tutors:

Ðonne cymð se dryhtnes domes dæg & wrace dæg ofer ða truman ceastra & ofer ða hean hwammas, Ðonne ðæt ierre ðæs ytemestan domes ða menniscan heortan towyrpð, ða ðe nu sindon betynede & getrymede mid lytelicum ladungum wið ða soðfæsðnesse, & arafað ðæt cliwen ðære twifaldan heortan.

(Then comes the Lord’s day of doom and the day of vengeance for the strong fortresses and the high regions, when the final doom destroys the human hearts, which now are closed and fortified with cunning excuses against the truth, and unravels the snarl of the deceitful heart.)

But when referring to the Apocalypse, the word dom itself still only meant judgment. It is the context or modifiers that give it the specific meaning, as in se dryhtnes domes dæg, or the Lord’s day of judgment, or as in the above passage ytemestan domes or final judgment

In Middle English, we start seeing the specific sense of the Last Judgment without modifiers, although the word still basically meant simply judgment. From the A-Text of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, written in the latter half of the fourteenth century:

At þe dredful dom, whanne dede shal arisen
And come alle before Crist accountes to ȝelden—
How þou leddist þi lif here and his law keptest,
And how þou dedist day by day þe dom wile reherce.
A pokeful of pardoun þere, ne prouincialis lettres,
Þeiȝ þou be founde in þe fraternite of alle þe foure ordris,
And have indulgence doublefold—but Dowel þe helpe,
I ne wolde ȝiue for þe patent of þi pardoun on pye hele!

(At the dreadful doom, when the dead shall arise
And all come before Christ to pay their accounts—
How you lead your life here and keep his law,
And how you act day by day will recite your doom,
A sack of pardons there, nor provincial letters,
Those that you can find in the fraternities of all the four orders [of friars],
And have indulgences two-fold—but Do-Well will help you,
I would not pay for the document of the pardon on your pious salvation!)

Eventually, the apocalyptic sense drove out the basic sense of doom, and that became the primary meaning. That basic sense was replaced by the Anglo-Norman jugger (to judge) and judgement.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. dom, n. domian, v., deman, v.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, vol. 1. A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. London: Longman, 1995, A.8.172–79, 353. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.14.

Liebermann, F. Die Gesetze der Angel Sachsen, vol. 1 of 3.. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1903, Ælfred § 43, 40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. dom, n., domen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. doom, n., doom, v., deem, v.

Sweet, Henry. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society O.S. 45. London: Oxford UP, 1871, 245. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: The Huth Psalter. London, British Library, Add MS 38116, fol. 13v. Public domain in the United States as a mechanical reproduction of a work of art that was produced before 1925.

mayday

4 May 2021

Mayday is a radio distress call, a phonetic representation of the French m’aidez (help me). The phrase differs from S.O.S. in that S.O.S. is used in Morse code transmissions while mayday is used in voice transmissions.

The distress call was first adopted for use in cross-Channel flights from Britain to France in early 1923. Mention of it appears in a number of British newspapers, including the Times, on 2 February 1923:

New arrangements for the salving [sic] of aeroplanes that may be forced to alight in the Channel will be in operation during the forthcoming night flights between London and Paris. Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter “S” by telephone, the international distress signal “S.O.S.” will give place to the words “May-day,” the phonetic equivalent of “M’aidez.” the French for “Help me.” During a recent test a R.A.F. flyingboat, descending in the Channel, gave the international distress signal three times by wireless telephony and reported that her engines had failed. The message was picked up at Croydon and Lympne. The Civil Aviation Traffic Officer at Lympne telephoned to the Dock Master at Dover, and within twenty minutes of the distress call a tug from Dover was alongside to give assistance, having steamed about three miles. No special warning had been given to Dover to be ready.

The distress call was adopted as the international standard by the 1927 International Radio Telegraph Convention held in Washington, D.C.

It’s often claimed that mayday was coined by Frederick Stanley Mockford, a radio operator at Croydon Airport in England. While plausible, this claim is undocumented.

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Sources:

“New Air Distress Signal.” Times (London), 2 February 1923, 7. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Mayday, int. and n.2.

“Radio-Telephony on the London–Continental Air Routes.” Aeronautical Digest, 3.5, November 1923. 343. Gale Primary Sources: Smithsonian Collections Online.

man / woman / wife

Detail of the Lindisfarne Gospels, Luke 2:23, showing the Old English interlinear gloss of the Latin text; being a Northumbrian text, it uses the mon form

3 May 2021

There were three basic Old English words for male and female humans, man, wer, and wif. And from these came two compounds also meaning man and woman, wæpman and wifman. Other Old English words for man and woman existed, many of them found chiefly in poetry, but etymologically it makes sense to group together the discussion of these five words. First, let’s take on man.

In Old English, one finds the forms man and mon. Of the two, mon would appear to be the older form and more common in the Mercian and Northumbrian dialects, with man arising in the West Saxon dialect. But since the majority of surviving texts are West Saxon, the man form is more common in the corpus. And since West Saxon was the dialect spoken in the region encompassing London and recorded in later court documents as the kings of Wessex came to rule all of England, man would become the standard form in Middle English and later. Although one can still see mon in Middle English texts from the Midlands.

In Old English, the word man could refer to both any person regardless sex or gender or to a male human. And, while the generic use of man is rightly discouraged in Present-Day English for being sexist, it can still be commonly seen, as in the word mankind. We can see this move toward non-sexist language in the phrase from the original 1966 Star Trek series, where no man has gone before, which was changed in the 1987 Star Trek: The Next Generation series to where no one has gone before.

(Indo-European languages consider sex and gender to be binary: male and female. While they may have terms that are sex- and gender-neutral that can refer to both male and female humans, they do not typically have terms for sexes and genders other than the binary male and female. Note: I’m not talking about grammatical gender here; that is a very different thing. Many Indo-European languages also have a neuter grammatical gender.)

As examples of these two uses of man, here are two passages from the same writer, Ælfric of Eynsham, a monk and homilist writing c.1000 C.E., and who was, perhaps, the chief prose stylist of the Old English period. The first, which uses man to refer to a generic human, is from Ælfric’s homily for the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter. In this passage, Peter is defending his association with and conversion of gentiles.

Gif god him forgeaf þæs halgan gastes gife, swa swa us on frymþe on fyrenum gereordum, hwæt eom ic manna þæt ic mihte god forbeodan?

(If God gave them the gift of the Holy Ghost, just as to us at the beginning in fiery tongues, what manner of man am I that I might forbid God?)

That manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius E.vii is from the early eleventh century. One later manuscript, the twelfth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343 uses the spelling monna. This manuscript is from the West Midlands or possibly the Hereford region and is an example of a later survival of that form in a Midlands dialect.

But in another homily about the cross-dressing Saint Eugenia, Ælfric uses man to refer specifically to a male human. Eugenia successfully took on the guise of a man in order to become a monk and eventually an abbot before being martyred. In this passage from early in her life, the bishop Helenus sees through her disguise, but he baptizes her and tells her to continue on her path. Again, this is from the early eleventh-century manuscript:

He genam hi þa onsundron and sæde hyre gewislice hwæt heo man ne wæs and hwylcere mægþe and þæt heo þurh mægð[-] had mycclum gelicode þam heofonlican cynige þe heo gecoren hæfde and cwæð þæt heo sceolde swiðlice æhtnyssa for mægðhade ðrowian and þeah beon gescyld þurh þone soðan drihten þe gescylt his gecorenan.

(Then he took her aside and said to her with certainty how she was no man and of which people [she was] and she through the virginity that she had chosen had greatly pleased the heavenly king and said that she would greatly suffer persecutions for her virginity and yet be shielded through the true Lord who shields his chosen ones.)

These two senses of man come down to us today pretty much unchanged.

The words wer and wif, specifically denoting male and female humans, can be seen in the poem Beowulf. Here the hall Heorot is being prepared for the celebrations following Beowulf’s killing of Grendel:

Ða wæs haten hreþe     Heort innanweard
folmum gefrætwod;     fela þæra wæs,
wera ond wifa     þe þæt winreced,
gestsele gyredon.

(Then, by command, the interior of Heorot was quickly decorated by hand; there were many men and women who prepared the guest-hall.)

Wer survives today only in fossilized form, such as in the word werewolf (literally, man-wolf). But in addition to denoting a female human, wif could also denote the spouse of a man, a wife. That sense is the chief sense of the word in Present-Day English.

And there are two compounds based on man, wæpman and wifman. The first has disappeared from the language, but wifman survives today as woman.

Wæpman literally meant man with a weapon. It might refer to a warrior, but weapon here is more likely a reference to a penis. Just as weapon can be used in present-day slang to mean penis, so it could a thousand years ago. We have this from a mid tenth-century Latin-English glossary:

Genitalia, þa cennendlican.
Uirilia, þa werlican.
Ueretrum, teors.
Calamus, teors, þæt wæpen, uel lim.
Testiculi, beallucas.

(Genitalia, the genitals.
Uirilia, the masculine.
Ueretrum, tarse [i.e., penis].
Calamus, tarse, that weapon or limb.
Testiculi, bollocks.)

And we also see wæpman being specifically to refer to a man in relation to penetrative sex. A tenth-century Old English interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels has this for Luke 2.23:

sicut scribtum est in lege Domini, Quia omne masculinum adaperiens vulvam sanctem Domino vocabitur

sua auritten is in æ Drihtnes þæte eghuelc he oððe weepenmon to untynes hrif oððe wom oððe inna halig Drihten bið geceiged

(As it is written in the law of the Lord, that every he or wæpman who opens a vulva or womb or uterus will be called holy by the Lord.)

And we see wæpman and wifman side by side in a late tenth-century translation of the Deuteronomy 22.5, in a passage that neither the aforementioned Eugenia nor Helenus appears to have read:

Ne scryde nan wif hig mid wæpmannes reafe, ne wæpman mid wifmannes reafe.

(No woman should clothe herself with a wæpman’s garments, nor a wæpman with a woman’s garments.)

Wifman started losing the < f > toward the end of the Old English period. From another biblical translation, this one of Judges 4:22 found in a late eleventh-century manuscript. Here Jahel, the woman in question, has just killed Sisara by hammering a nail through his temple:

Barac com sona, sohte þone Sisara; wolde hine ofslean. Ða clipode seo wimman cuðlice him to; het hine sceawian þone þe he sohte; & he geseah þa hwar Sisara læg, & se teldsticca sticode þurh his heafod.

(Barac came at once, seeking after Sisara; he wished to kill him. Then the woman called clearly to him that she would show him whom he sought; and he saw where Sisara lay, and the tent-peg stuck through his head.)

The vowel shift and spelling to woman happened in Middle English.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Kalendas Martias. Cathedra Sancti Petri” (“22 February. The Chair of Saint Peter”) and “Eodem die natale Sancte Eugenie Uirginis” (“25 December. Saint Eugenia, Virgin”). Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1 of 3. Walter Skeat, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 76. London: Oxford UP, 1881, 232, 28–30. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, MS Cotton Julius E.vii.

Deuteronomy 22.5 and Judges 4:22. S. J. Crawford. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society O.S. 160. London: Oxford UP, 1922, 355 and 405. London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 509.

Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008, lines 991–94a.

Luke 2:23. The Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels, vol. 3. Publications of the Surtees Society 43. Durham: Andrews and Co., 1834, 17. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv, fol. 144r.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. man, n.1 (and int.); March 2021, s.v. wife, n., woman, n.; second edition, 1989, were, n.1., wapman, n.

Wright, Thomas. Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies, vol 1, second ed. Richard Paul Wülcker, ed. London: Trübner and Co., 1884, 265. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra A.iii.

Image credit: London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv, fol. 144r.

Louisiana

Facsimile of a 1684 map of Louisiane (Louisiana) made by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, who accompanied Cavelier’s expedition. The facsimile dates to c.1900; the original has been lost.

30 April 2021

Louisiana was named in 1682 after King Louis XIV of France by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The claim to the territory was exchanged among European states several times, and it was eventually sold by Napoleon to the United States in 1803 for $16 million (around $375 million in today’s dollars). Louisiana, or Louisiane in French, originally encompassed an area much larger than the present-day state. The territory, at the time of the sale to the United States, included what are now the states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska; most of what are now Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota; and portions of what are now Texas, New Mexico, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

Obviously, there is no single, indigenous name for this wide territory, and even within the borders of the present-day state, there were a number of indigenous tribes and bands who made it their home. Currently, there are four federally recognized tribes in the state of Louisiana: the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. The Chitimacha are the only tribe in the state still occupying a portion of their original lands.

While there is no single indigenous name for the territory now occupied by the state of Louisiana, there are any number of indigenous toponyms for places within the state. For example, in the Tunica language New Orleans is called tonrɔwahal'ukini, literally white man’s town, from oni (person) + rɔwa (white) + hali (land) + uki (to dwell).

The name Louisiana appears in English by 1693, using the French spelling. From Bohun and Barnard’s Geographical Dictionary of that year:

Louisiane, a large Country South West of New France in America, lately discovered by the French as far as to the Mouth of the River Colbert, in the South Sea, and so called in honour of their present King Lewis XIV. They report it to enjoy a very fruitful Clime for Wine, Corn, Fruits, Fish, and Fowl.

The familiar English spelling appears the following year in a theological text by Humphry Hody:

The Inhabitants of Louisiana, another Country in the Northern America, lately discover'd by the French, seem to hold, That the Soul after Death shall be re-united to its Body.

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Sources:

Bohun, Edmund and J.A. Bernard. A Geographical Dictionary. London: Charles Brome, 1693, 238. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Hody, Humphrey. The Resurrection of the (Same) Body. London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1694, 46. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. Tunica-English Dictionary, 2020.

Image credit: Library of Congress. Public domain image.