absentee

An 1880 political cartoon titled “What Things Are Coming to; or, the Boycotted and Land-Leagued Landowner.” A tenant, wearing a traditional Irish conical hat, smoking a pipe, and holding a cudgel behind his back, confronts a blind landlord in shabby and worn clothing begging for rent. The landlord bears a sign reading, “Pity the Poor Landlord,” and is drawn to resemble English prime minister William Gladstone.

19 May 2021

An absentee is someone who is not present when they are supposed to be. It is an example of semantic generalization, a word that at first refers to a specific thing but over time comes to refer to a wider category of things. In this case, absentee originally referred to English owners of land in Ireland who seldom or never visited their Irish estates, but eventually the word came to refer to anyone who wasn’t at a place when they were supposed to have been.

Absentee comes from the verb absent + -ee. The English verb to absent, meaning to withdraw or remove oneself, dates to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries. It is a borrowing of the Anglo-Norman verb absenter, to stay away from, a verb that is recorded in the late thirteenth century and which comes from the Latin absentare. The -ee suffix, originally used in legal terms but which has since expanded into other contexts, marks nouns used as indirect objects. It is from the Anglo-Norman -é.

Absentee first appears in English in the Act of Absenties (28.H8), passed by the Irish parliament in 1537 during the reign of Henry VIII. The intent of the act was to seize revenues from absentee landlords in Ireland, ostensibly for the benefit of the Irish people and the security of English rule in Ireland, because of the failures of the absentee landlords to maintain their estates. But it was passed contemporaneously with Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in England, part of a larger scheme to raise money for the crown. This passage quoted below is from the beginning of the act and contains part of one of the longest sentences I have ever seen, extending over two pages (the initial sentence of the act ends just before the word, “Be it enacted”):

The Act of Absenties.

For asmuch as it is notorious and manifest that this the Kings land of Ireland being inhabited and in due obedience and subiection unto the Kings most noble progenitors kings of England, who in those dayes in the right of the Crowne of England, had great possessions, rents, and profites within the same land, hath principally growen into ruine, dessolation. rebellion and decay, by occasion that great dominions, landes, and possessions within the same land, as well by the kings graunts as by course of inheritance, and otherwise desceded to Noblemen of the Realme of England, and especially the lands and dominions of the Earledomes in Ulster and Leinster, who hauing the same both they and their heyres by processe of time demoring within the said realme of England, and not prouiding for the good order and suertie of the same their possessions there, in their absence and by their negligences suffered those of the wilde Irishrie being mortall and naturall enemies of the kings of England, and English dominion, to enter and hold the same without resistance, [...] and that if his Grace would take of the inheritors and possessioners of the same, the arrerages of the two parts of the yearely profites thereof by reason of their absence out of the said land, contrary to ye statuts therof prouided, the same would counteruaile the purchase therof, yet for corroboration of the right and title of our said soueraigne Lord the King, and his heires, which he hath to all the same lands, dominions and possessions. Be it enacted, established, and ordeyned by the king our soueraigns Lord, Lords spirituall and temporall, and commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by authoritie of the same, that King, his heyres and assignes shall haue, hold, and enioy as in the right of the Crowne of England, all honors, mannors, castles, seigniories, hundreds, franchises, liberties, countie palantines, iurisdictions, anuities, knights fees, aduowsons, patronages, lands tenements, wood, meadowes [...]

Thomas Blount’s legal dictionary of 1670 defines absentee, notes its French origin, and references the 1537 act:

Absentees or des Absentees, was a Parliament so called, held at Dublin, 10 May, 28 H.8.

The 1537 act hardly ended, or even curtailed, the practice of absentee landlordism, and the abuses the Irish people suffered under neglect of their absent landlords and the money continually siphoned out of Ireland became one of leading causes of Irish rebellion over the centuries.

In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift wrote, under the pseudonym of M. B. Drapier, of the practice in one of series of pamphlets attacking the practices of English governance in Ireland. “An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament” (Drapier Letter 7) is primarily in opposition to a patent to mint coins granted to William Wood, but mentions the problem of absentee landlords shipping their profits over the Irish Sea to England. The pamphlet was written c.1725 but went initially unpublished because the patent had been withdrawn. It was finally published ten years later in a collection of Swift’s works:

The Rents of Land in Ireland, since they have been of late so enormously raised and screwed up, may be computed to about two Millions; whereof one third Part, at least, is directly transmitted to those, who are perpetual Absentees in England, as I find by a Computation made with the Assistance of several skillful Gentlemen.

Nor is absentee the only word to arise out of the practice of absentee landlordism in Ireland. The term boycott also arose out of the practice.

But also in the eighteenth century, the meaning of absentee expanded to include people other than English landlords who weren’t in Ireland. In his 1792 memoirs, Unitarian and dissenting writer Gilbert Wakefield wrote of the practice of beneficed clergy hiring others to do their work for them in the pulpit:

The common exhibitioners at St. Mary’s, were the hack preachers, employed in the service of defaulters and absentees. A piteous unedifying tribe!

And by the early nineteenth century, absentee was being used to denote students who played hooky. From Joseph Lancaster’s 1805 edition of his Improvements in Education:

The monitor calls his boys to muster—the class go out of the seats in due order—go round the school-room; and, in going, each boy stops, and ranges himself against the wall, under that number which belongs to his name in the class-list. By this means the absentees are pointed out at once—every boy who is absent will leave a number vacant.

The use of absentee in the context of voting started during the U.S. Civil War, allowing for soldiers stationed away from home to vote. The following is from a speech given by William Warner, a member of the Michigan state legislature, to that body on 28 January 1864:

The House bill No. 5 provides, that polls shall be opened for each regiment, or detached portion of each regiment or company of Michigan soldiers, when absent from the township or ward in which they reside, in the military service of this State or of the United States; that such polls shall be opened on the same day that is provided for by Title 83, Chap. 6, of the compiled laws; that Commissioners shall be appointed to take the votes of such absentees; that the votes shall be canvassed immediately after the polls shall be closed.

A rather long path from sixteenth-century Ireland to the U.S. Civil War.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. absenter.

Blount, Thomas. ΝΟΜΟ-ΛΕΞΙΚΟΝ: A Law Dictionary. London: Thomas Newcomb for John Martin and Henry Herringman, 1670. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lancaster, Joseph. Improvements in Education, third edition. London: Darton and Harvey, 1805, 112. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. absentee, n. and adj., absent, v.

The Statutes of Ireland, Beginning the Third Yere of K. Edward the Second, and Continuing Until the End of the Parliament, Begunne in the Eleventh Yeare of the Reign of Our Most Gracious Soveraigne Lord King James. Dublin: Society of Stationers, 1621, 95–100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Swift, Jonathan (under the pseudonym of M. B. Drapier). “An Humble Address to Both Houses of Parliament” (Drapier Letter 7) (c.1725). Works, vol. 4. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1735, 223. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Wakefield, Gilbert. Memoirs of the Life of Gilbert Wakefield. London: E. Hodson, 1792, 97. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Warner, William. Soldier’s Suffrage. Detroit: 1864, 5. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Thomson, John Gordon. “What Things Are Coming to; or, the Boycotted and Land-Leagued Landowner.” Fun, 32.812, 1 December 1880, 217. ProQuest Historical Periodicals. Public domain image.

cicada

Seventeen-year cicada nymph of Brood X (dead); an orange insect with large, red eyes and small, immature wings

17 May 2021

Cicadas are insects of the order Hemiptera (i.e., true bugs) and the superfamily Cicadoidea. They are found throughout the world. But those of the North American genus Magicicada have the unusual property of living underground for periods of thirteen or seventeen years. This behavior is believed to have evolved as a survival strategy. When they emerge, they do so in such great numbers that there are simply too many for predators to eat, and the long periods between their emergences keeps predator populations low. A large brood of seventeen-year cicadas is emerging in the Middle-Atlantic and Midwest states in 2021.

The name cicada is from Latin and echoic, an imitation of the insect’s sound.

Pliny the Elder has a passage on cicadas in his Natural History. Written by 77 C.E., the passage reads, in part:

Similis cicadis vita, quarum duo genera: minores quae primae proveniunt et novissimae pereunt—sunt autem mutae; sequens est volatura earum3 quae canunt: vocantur achetae et, quae minores ex his sunt, tettigonia, sed illae magis canorae. mares canunt in utroque genere, feminae silent.

(The life-history of the cicada is similar. Of this there are two kinds: the smaller ones that come out first and perish latest—these however are mute; subsequent is the flight of those that sing: they are called Singers, and the smaller ones among them grass-hoppers, but the former are more vocal. The males in either class sing, but the females are silent.)

Virgil makes a more poetic reference to cicadas in his Eclogue 5, composed c.40 B.C.E.:

Haec tibi semper erunt, et cum sollemnia vota
reddemus Nymphis, et cum lustrabimus agros.
dum iuga montis aper, fluvios dum piscis amabit,
dumque thymo pascentur apes, dum rore cicadae,
semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt.
ut Baccho Cererique, tibi sic vota quotannis
agricolae facient; damnabis tu quoque votis

(These rites shall be yours for ever, both when we pay our yearly vows to the Nymphs, and when we purify our fields. So long as the boar loves the mountaintops, and the fish the streams; so long as the bees feed on thyme and the cicadas on dew—so long shall your honour, name, and glory abide. As to Bacchus and Ceres, so to you, year after year, shall the husbandmen pay their vows; you, too, shall hold them to their vows.)

The word cicada appears in English in the fourteenth century. John Trevisa’s c.1387 translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum has this:

There is a maner grashoppere þat hatte cicada and haþ þat name of canendo “syngynge,” for wiþ a ful litil throte he[o] schapiþ a wondirful song, as hit is isaide in Exameron. This cicada in þe myddel hete at mydday whanne treen brekep wiþ hete, þanne þe more clere eyre sche draweþ, þe more clereliche sche syngep. Also ȝif a man hielde oyle vpon þis cicadas he dieþ anone for þe poores þep istoppid þat þey may nouȝt drawe breeþ. But ȝif me hielde vppon hem vynegre anon, þanne þay beeþ onlyue anon, for þe strengpe of þe vynegre openeþ hooles and pores þat weren istoppid by byndynge of oyle, as Ambrose seiþ.

(There is a manner of grasshopper that is called cicada and has the name of canendo “singing,” for with a very small throat she shapes a wonderful song, as it is said in the Hexameron. This cicada in the middle heat at midday when trees break with heat, then the more clear air she draws, the more clearly she sings. Also, if a man pours oil upon these cicadas they soon die for the pores are stopped so that they may not draw breath. But if I quickly pour vinegar upon them, then they are soon alive, for the strength of the vinegar opens holes and pores that were stopped by the binding of oil, as Ambrose says.)

Cicadas are ugly critters, and, when they emerge in great numbers, they can be annoying, but they are, in the words of Douglas Adams, mostly harmless.

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Sources:

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. cicada, -e, n.

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

Pliny. Natural History, Books 8–11, second edition. H. Rackham, trans. Loeb Classical Library 353. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983, 11.32, 488–89.

Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum, vol. 1 of 3. M.C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 12.14, 625. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Virgil. “Eclogue 5” Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, revised edition.. H. Rushton Fairclough, trans. G.P. Goold, revisions. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999, lines 74–80, 58–59.

Image credit: David Wilton, 2021.

mondegreen

14 May 2021

A 1592 “vendetta portrait” of James Stewart, the second Earl of Moray, painted to keep alive the memory of his murder. The body of a naked, dead man with a burial shroud strategically laid across his loins, showing wounds on his face, torso, and leg, and the words “God revenge my caus” written above.

What is a mondegreen you ask? It is a misheard song lyric (or other utterance), one where the phonemes can be interpreted to have an entirely different meaning than what the lyricist intended. Some examples include:

• “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear” (Gladly the Cross I’d Bear), from the hymn of that title

• “A girl with colitis goes by” (a girl with kaleidoscope eyes), from Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds, by the Beatles

• “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” (excuse me while I kiss the sky), from Purple Haze, by Jimi Hendrix

• “Who knows what evil lurks in the hot cement” (who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men), catchphrase for the radio show The Shadow

And my personal favorite:

• “He suffered under a bunch of spiders” (He suffered under Pontius Pilate), from the Apostle’s Creed

Mondegreen was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in 1954 in regard to a misheard lyric from her childhood. The song in question was the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl o’ Moray”:

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands
     O where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
     And hae laid him on the green.

The ballad is about the death of James Stewart, the second Earl of Moray, who was murdered in February 1591/92 by George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly.

In the November 1954 issue of Harper’s magazine, Wright described how, as a child, she misheard the lyrics to that ballad:

WHEN I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:

     Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
    Oh, where hae ye been?
    They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
    And Lady Mondegreen.

I saw it all clearly. The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark green dress embroidered with light green leaves outlined in gold. It had a low neck trimmed with white lace (Irish lace, I think). An arrow had pierced her throat: from it blood trickled down over the lace. Sunlight coming through the leaves made dappled shadows on her cheeks and her closed eyelids. She was holding the Earl's hand.

It made me cry.

[...]

By now, several of you more alert readers are jumping up and down in your impatience to interrupt and point out that, according to the poem, after they killed the Earl of Murray, they laid him on the green. I know about this, but I won't give in to it. Leaving him to die all alone without even anyone to hold his hand—I won't have it.

The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.

Within a few years mondegreen had entered into the psychological literature. From Robert Reiff and Martin Scheerer’s 1959 Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression:

In giving the Pledge of Allegiance test to the control and to the experimental subjects, we expected and predicted that at experimental age ten the regressed subjects would use more improper wording (Mondegreenisms) in writing the Pledge than the simulators would. [...] An example of improper wording is “One nation invisible.”

The term mondegreen, however, doesn’t appear again in mainstream print sources for almost two decades. Either it continued quietly in oral use or it disappeared, only to be remembered and revived in 1973 by Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith. He wrote the following in an 18 March 1973 piece that was syndicated in papers throughout the United States:

Charlotte Bernard of Los Angeles recalls a special kind of malapropism called a Mondegreen, derived from the author Sylvia Wright’s memories of a Scottish ballad her mother used to sing [....] As a child, Miss Wright always heard the last two lines as “Ye have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.” Thus the Mondegreen—a misheard phrase from a poem or song, such as “Lead me not into Penn Station,” and “Oh, say can you see by the Donzerly Light.”

And as we are reminded by David Curtis, of the English department at Corona del Mar High School—“Hollywood be Thy name.”

And in a 27 May 1979 New York Times Magazine column on malapropisms, metanalyses, and folk etymologies, William Safire wrote:

What all-inclusive term can we use to encompass the changes that our brains make in the intended meaning of what we hear? Linguists suggest “homophone,” “unwitting paronomasia” and “agnominatio,” but those terms sound like fancified dirty words to me.

I prefer “mondegreen.” This is a word coined in a 1954 Harper’s Magazine article, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen” by Sylvia Wright.

And he concludes with a plea for readers to stop sending him examples:

Thanks to responsive readers, I have a column on sound effects and whole closetful of mondegreens. But a nuff is a nuff.

Unlike Safire, if you have any good ones, send them my way.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Mackie, R.L., ed. “The Bonny Earl o’ Moray.” A Book of Scottish Verse, second edition. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 143. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, s.v. mondegreen, n.

Reiff, Robert and Martin Scheerer. Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression. New York: International Universities Press, 1959, 126–27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Safire, William. “On Language: I Led the Pigeons to the Flag.” New York Times Magazine, 27 May 1979, 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Smith, Jack. “A Hobby Paceoff in Diffidence.” Los Angeles Times, 18 March 1973, D1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wright, Sylvia. “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.” Harper’s, November 1954, 48–49. Harpers.org.

Image credit: Anonymous artist, 1592. Public domain image.

Molotov cocktail

1940 charcoal drawing of two Spanish Republican soldiers using Molotov cocktails against a Nationalist tank during the Spanish Civil War. Image of a burning tank in an urban setting, with an infantryman who has just thrown a Molotov cocktail and another about to throw a second.

13 May 2021

A Molotov cocktail is a makeshift gasoline bomb, what we called a flame field expedient when I was in the U.S. Army. While there are many variations on the design, typically a Molotov cocktail is a bottle filled with gasoline with a cloth stopper that also serves as a fuse. It is named after Vjacehslav Mihajlovich Skrjabin (1890–1986), who took the revolutionary name of Molotov—молот (molot) is Russian for the hammer. Molotov was the Soviet premier and foreign minister during the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland (November 1939–March 1940). (Joseph Stalin was the general secretary of the Communist Party and the person actually in charge of the Soviet Union at the time, but Molotov was technically the head of government and its face to the outside world.) Many of the earliest English uses have the spelling Molotoff, which uses an older transcription system from the Russian Cyrillic.

The phrase Molotov cocktail is most likely a calque of the Finnish molotovin koktaili, although the English term is found in print before the Finnish one—and the Finnish term is a borrowing from two languages, the Russian proper name and the English cocktail. The idea behind naming the device after Molotov is that it is a bomb to be made for and used against his soldiers, not a device that was invented by the man.

The Finns may have coined the name, but they did not invent the device, which had been used before. Ethiopians used a similar weapon against Italian tanks in 1935, but they would break a bottle of gasoline against the tank and then ignite the spilled liquid. Both sides in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) used the incendiary devices as we know them today. And the Chinese used them against the Japanese from 1937 onward. A description of their use in Spain appears in the 15 June 1940 issue of the Picture Post, an issue devoted to informing Britons what they might expect during a German invasion. This article calls them petrol bombs rather than Molotov cocktails:

There is no reason whatever why a great industrial nation such as ours should not make plenty of these grenades in a week or two. We in Spain had not always enough, so we used “petrol bombs.” I do not recommend these, and I mention them only with a serious warning. At least ten per cent. of those who try these nasty things are likely to burn themselves quite badly.

A detailed description of how to make petrol bombs follows. Despite ending with the warning, “Do not play with these things. They are highly dangerous,” the article is clearly hinting that British civilians should know how to make them in case of German invasion.

Finnish soldier with a Molotov cocktail, c.1940. Man’s torso, wearing a white coat and military equipment belt, into which is tucked a liquid-filled bottle with a long match tied to it.

A description of Finnish Molotov cocktails, but not the term itself, appears somewhat earlier in an article in the Times of London with a dateline of 28 December 1939 and published the next day:

Thirty-six young Finns were resting inside a deep dug-out we visited last night, while enemy artillery continued intermittent firing. These 36, with three officers, were part of the forces which had repelled the most recent attack on the [Mannerheim] Line and their resting might be a mere interval, the prelude to a new clash. They were all fully dressed, therefore, with their weapons handy.

Among these were some curiously stringed bottles with a firestick attached longitudinally; they are primitive homemade tank-bombs, which proved again effective in the fighting on Boxing Day, when the enemy attempted once more to force a gap with the help of tanks, but failed after a loss of eight.

Within a hundred yards of the dug-out we could make out five derelict tanks scattered on the battlefield between opposing positions, which the failure of the Russian attempt had left unaltered. On Christmas Day officers had informed me that the Russians had abandoned the use of tanks for some days, in an endeavour to press their infantry forward after vigorous artillery preparation here and there; but on Boxing Day they resumed their earlier tactics.

WAITING IN MANHOLES

The cool audacity of these young Finns defies description. Singly they occupy small manholes, 6ft. deep, preferably under cover of darkness—though brilliant moonlight has lately hampered these operations. There they wait hour after hour with the top of the hole lightly camouflaged. If an advancing tank survives Finnish artillery, mines, and tank-traps nearer the enemy lines and crosses one of these holes, a hand emerges behind the tail and hurls one or two bottles, which are smashed and catch fire, causing sufficient confusion to enable the Finns to capture and demolish the tank.

A captain, describing the process to me, explained that they had now had deliveries of less primitive incendiary missiles, and led me to a dump where the supplies were buried in snow. Each missile was composed of a metal case with a handle and a fuse, which ignited the contents five seconds after the missile had been thrown. But bottles are still used as well, and the manhole method is unchanged.

The English term is first found in a 10 February 1940 article that was widely syndicated among U.S. newspapers. This version, which uses the spelling Molotoff cocktail, is from the Atlanta Constitution. Other papers edited the piece to use the Molotov transcription of the name:

These purely Finnish methods are effective only if the tank-hunter is willing to get close enough to his quarry to endanger himself, and the Finns appear to have been willing to accept that hazard.

Method No. 1 is to tie six or seven hand grenades together, get within easy pegging distance of the tank and smash them up against its sides. This weapon is known as “a bunch of grapes.”

Method No. 2 is an improvement on No. 1. You include bottles of gasoline among the grenades. The explosion ignites the gasoline and the tank crew either crawls out and surrenders or is burned to death. This weapon is called the “Molotoff cocktail” in honor of the Soviet Premier Molotoff.

There is an earlier English use of Molotoff cocktail to refer to the fuel mixture used in Russian tanks, which proved inadequate in the cold of the Finnish winter. Whether this is yet another Finnish play on Molotov’s name—it’s not unusual for a slang term in its early days to have more than one meaning—or a misunderstanding on the part of the English war correspondent is not known. In any case, this sense of Molotoff cocktail did not survive for long. From the London Times, dateline 26 January 1940:

“Molotoff Cocktail”
One of the Russian tanks had been destroyed by only one direct hit from a 3in. gun. The tanks often get stuck on the road, as the petrol mixture used —the so-called Molotoff cocktail—seems to be unsuitable for these temperatures. It is absolutely impossible to drive the tanks anywhere off the roadway, as the snowdrifts are in places more than 30ft. deep.

While it is most likely that English got Molotov cocktail from Finnish, the Finnish term is not found in print until 1941, a year after the phrase is recorded in English. But there are a plethora of Finnish terms from that war that are plays on Molotov’s name, which would make Molotov cocktail only the most famous of more than two dozen that have been recorded. A handful of examples:

• molotovi — a Soviet person

• Molotovin ilma and Molotovin sää — Molotov weather (suitable for air operations)

• Molotovin muna — an aerial bomb, literally Molotov egg

• Molotovin leipäkori — an early form of a cluster bomb used by the Soviets, literally Molotov breadbasket

Additionally, in order for the term to move from English to Finnish there would need to be a vector or channel for the transmission. It’s possible that Finnish soldiers might have picked up the word from British or American war correspondents, but that is highly unlikely. It is far more likely that the war correspondents learned the term from the Finns.

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Sources:

“A Deadlock in the Arctic” (26 January 1940). Times (London), 27 January 1940, 6. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Gold, David L. “Etymology and Etiology in the Study of Eponymous Lexemes: the Case of English Molotov Cocktail and Finnish Molotovin Koktaili.” In Studies in Etymology and Etiology. San Vincente del Raspeig: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 2009, 193–235.

———. “Etymology and Etiology in the Study of Proper Nouns, Eponymous Lexemes, and Possibly Eponymous Lexemes.” Onomastica, 41, 1996, 109–38.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Molotov, n.

Uexkuell, Hubert. “‘How to Kill Tank’ Lesson—Use ‘Grapes’ and ‘Cocktails’” (10 February 1940). Atlanta Constitution, 19A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wintringham, Tom. “Against Invasion: The Lessons of Spain.” Picture Post, 7.11, 15 June 1940, 14 –17. Gale Primary Sources: Picture Post.

“Young Men’s Daring” (28 December 1939). Times (London), 29 December 1940, 6. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Image credits: Bryan de Grineau, appearing in Picture Post, 15 June 1940, fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion; unknown photographer, c.1940. Public domain image.

moll

Cover of Middleton and Dekker’s 1611 play The Roaring Girle. An image of a woman in men’s clothing, carrying a sword and smoking a pipe.

12 May 2021

It’s not the image most of us have of her, but Bonnie Parker (1910–34), of Bonnie and Clyde fame, penned several poems. One, titled “The Story of Suicide Sal,” is semi-autobiographical. She wrote it in 1932 while in jail awaiting a grand jury verdict for an attempted robbery—the grand jury eventually failed to indict her, and she was released. But Clyde Barrow had eluded capture, and she was afraid that he had abandoned her. One passage from that poem reads:

But not long ago I discovered
From a gal in the joint named Lyle,
That Jack and his “moll” had “got over”
And were living in true “gangster style.”
If he had returned to me sometime,
Though he hadn’t a cent to give,
I’d forget all this hell that he's caused me,
And love him as long as I live.
But there’s no chance of his ever coming,
For he and his moll have no fears
But that I will die in this prison,
Or “flatten” this fifty years.

But why did Parker refer to the woman who had replaced Sal in Jack’s affections as a moll? It’s a term meaning the female companion of a criminal, but where does the term come from?

Moll is a hypocoristic form of (i.e., pet name for) Mary. The connection between Moll and Mary doesn’t seem obvious on its face, but such shifts between the liquid consonants / l / and / r / are quite common. We see similar shifts in the pairs Dolly/Dorothy, Sally/Sarah, and Hal/Harry.

The association of the name Moll with women of low character is most likely a result of the common belief, unsupported by any scriptural evidence, that Mary Magdalene had been a prostitute. But we first see the association between low character and the name Mary in the hypocoristic Malekin, a diminutive of Matilda or Maud, which was later conflated with Moll and Mary. The use of Malekin to refer to a woman with sexual agency appears in the late thirteenth-century poem A Lutel Soth Sermon (A Short, True Sermon):

Þes persones ich wene;
   ne beoþ heo noȝt for-bore
Ne þeos prude ȝungemen
   þat luuieþ malekin,
And þeos prude maidenes
   þat luuieþ Ianekin.
At chirche and at cheping
   hwanne heo to-gadere come
Heo runeþ to-gaderes
   and spekeþ of derne luue.

(These people I know;
   They do not restrain themselves
Not these proud young men
   that love Malekin
And these proud maidens
   that love Johnny
At church and at market
   when they come together
They whisper together
   and speak of secret love.)

And in the late fourteenth century Chaucer has the host speak these words in the introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale:

Wel kan Senec and many a philosophre
Biwaillen tyme moore than gold in cofre;
For “Los of catel may recovered be,
But los of tyme shendeth us,” quod he.
It wol nat come agayn, withouten drede,
Nomoore than wole Malkynes maydenhede,
Whan she hath lost it in hir wantownesse.
Lat us nat mowlen thus in ydelnesse.

(Well can Seneca and many a philosopher
Bewail time more than gold in a coffer;
For “loss of property may be recovered,
But loss of time ruins us,” said he.
It will not come again, without doubt,
No more than will Malkin’s maidenhead,
When she has lost it in her wantoness.
Let us not grow moldy thus in idleness.)

The link between a Moll with sexual agency and Mary Magdalene is made explicit in Lewis Wager’s 1566 The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene:

Let me fele your poulses mistresse Mary be you sick
By my trouth in as good te[m]pre as any woman can be
Your vaines are full of bloud, lusty and quicke,
In better taking truly I did you neuer see.

The body is whole, but sick is the conscience,
Which neither the law nor man is able to heale,
It is the word of God receyued with penitence,
Like as the boke of wisedome doth plainly reueale.

Conscience? how doth thy conscience litle Mall?
Was thy conscience sicked, alas little foole?

And in his 1604 Father Hubbards Tales: or the Ant and the Nightingale, Thomas Middleton writes:

[He] would not stick to be a Bawd, or Pander to such young Gallants as our young Gentleman, either to acquaint them with Harlots, or Harlots with them, to bring them a whole dozen of Taffeta Punkes at a supper, and they should be none of these common Molls neither, but discontented and vnfortunate Gentlewoman, whose Parents being lately deceased, the brother ranne away with all the land, and the poore Squalles with a litle mony, which cannot hold out long without some commings in, but they will rather venture a Maidenhead then want a Head tyre

But the association of the name Moll with prostitution and pandering would be given a boost by the exploits of Mary Frith, a.k.a. Moll Cutpurse (c.1584–1659). Frith was a cross-dressing thief, fence, and pimp who became notorious in her day. It does not appear that Frith was a prostitute herself, although we can’t rule that out. Her sexuality cannot be known now, but she might identify as a lesbian or trans-man were she alive today. We do know, however, that she was quite famous in her day. Two plays inspired by her life were written during her lifetime. One, the 1610 The Madde Prankes of Mery Mall by John Day, has been lost, but the other, the 1611 The Roaring Girle by the aforementioned Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, survives. In the play, a young man named Sebastian wishes to marry a girl named Mary, but their fathers disapprove of the match, so Sebastian pretends to court Moll Cutpurse in order to make Mary seem more appealing to his father. In this passage, Sebastian and his father, Alexander, discuss the objection to Sebastian’s choice in women:

Seb.   Why is the name of Mol so fatall sir.

Alex.   Many one sir, where suspect is entred,
For seeke all London from one end to t'other,
More whoores of that name, then of any ten other.

Thieves and other criminals are known, or at least thought, to associate with prostitutes, and by the nineteenth century Moll had come to refer to a criminal’s female companion, whether or not she was actually a sex worker. From an 1823 dictionary of slang written by John Badcock under the pseudonym of John Bee:

Molls—are the female companions of low thieves, at bed, board, and business.

From Mary Magdalene to Mary Frith to Bonnie Parker, that’s how the name Moll became associated with criminality.

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Sources:

Bee, John (pseudonym of John Badcock). Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life. London: T. Hughes, 1823, 120. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale” (c.1390). The Canterbury Tales. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer’s Website.

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

“A Lutel Soth Sermon” (c.1275). An Old English Miscellany. Richard Morris, ed. Old English Text Society 49. London: N. Trübner, 1872, lines 51–60, 188. HathiTrust Digital Library. London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.9.

Middleton, Thomas. Father Hubbards Tales: or the Ant and the Nightingale. London: T. Creede for William Cotton, 1604, sig. D1r.

Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cut-Purse. London: Thomas Archer, 1611, sig. E2v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. moll, n.2.

Parker, Bonnie. “The Story of Suicide Sal.” Emma Parker and Nell Barrow Cohen. Fugitives: The Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Jan I. Fortune, ed. Dallas: Ranger Press, 1934, 101. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wager, Lewis. A New Enterlude, Never Before This Tyme Imprinted, Entreating of the Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene. London: John Charlewood, 1566, sig. f.2.r–v.