mulligan

25 May 2021

Cartoon by sportswriter Bozeman Bulger illustrating the fictional Swat Milligan’s 1,278 RBI hit. A stick-figure man in baseball uniform hitting a line drive into a sign on the outfield fence.

Mulligan is golf jargon for an extra stroke allowed after a bad shot in a friendly game. Since mulligans are not permitted in tournament golf, when and how often they may be taken varies widely, but typically, one mulligan is allowed per round. And sometimes, mulligans are only allowed on drives from the tee. As to the word’s origin, there are a number of stories about golfers named Mulligan who gave their name to the practice, but none of these tales have any solid evidence in support, and it seems that mulligan actually made its way into golf from baseball, after a fictional long-ball hitter named Swat Milligan or Mulligan. It eventually came to mean a hard-hit ball, like one Milligan would hit. From there, it moved into golf, where it originally referred to a long drive from the tee. And from there, a second chance to hit a mulligan from the tee after a muffed drive.

The etymology of mulligan was unearthed by Peter Reitan and published in his blog in 2017. What I present here is mostly the fruits of his work.

Swat Milligan was the creation of New York Evening World sportswriter Bozeman Bulger in 1908. Milligan was the stuff of tall tales, a Paul Bunyan or John Henry of baseball. The earliest appearance of Milligan in the Evening World that I have found is from 26 May 1908:

I will say, however, that Milligan was regarded as the most scientific place hitter of the age. His marvellous [sic] ability can best be explained by recalling an incident in his career just after he quit the Willow Swamps and signed with the Poison Oaks. So many balls had been lost on Swat’s long drives that the club was almost in bankruptcy. Balls cost $1.25 each, you know. Something had to be done to curtail this expense or Milligan’s career would necessarily end.

The club finally hit upon the plan of having Swat hit all of his balls into the same spot and then corral them.

Two weeks later, on 8 June 1908, Bulger was telling this tale that illustrates Milligan’s prowess with a bat:

Bozeman Bulger,
Sporting Department, Evening World:
The fans out this way may want to know how many pairs of shoes Swat Milligan received for that wallop that brought in 1,278 runs? How many shoes did he wear out in running the bases, &c.f.
ADAM RENAL,
No. 165 West Sixtieth st.

It is easy to observe, Adam, that you have are of a statistical turn of mind. For your information in that respect I will relate an incident that occurred on the first day of Swat’s arrival in fast company.

Milligan had just come up from Hitchingpost Hollow to join the Poison Oaks. He was practically unknown. As he entered the park on the morning before the game he noticed a sign offering a pair of shoes for every home run [....] They understood the rule that allowed a hitter to make as many runs as possible while the fielders were chasing the ball, but as no runner had ever scored over two runs at one time they had no fears [....]

The shoe wagons arrived on the grounds in the seventh inning, and as the bases were full Milligan was sent up with his big stick. Look carefully over the field he again saw the shoe sign. Just in the middle of it was a period painted green and about the size of a baseball. That steely glint came into the great batter’s eye and fandom knew that his mind was fixed.

Turning around like a whirling Dervish, Swat landed an awful rap, and the ball went whistling like a bullet straight to the shoe sign. It caught the punctuation mark as squarely as a die, and went tearing through it. So great was the force of the shot that it made no more noise than a bullet going through a door. The fielders rushed to the sign, but could see no trace of the ball. As the period was painted green they could see the green of the trees through the hole and [sic] though it was still there. Four hours later they gave up the search. But Swat—oh where was he?

Being ambitious in those days Swat tore around the bases so fast on the first twenty runs that he wore out a pair of shoes every two laps, and the shoe dealers began to open up the boxes. Relays of shoes were placed at first and third bases, and as Swat would wear out a pair he would jump into another, and keep on his wild career.

But Swat Milligan was too big a character to be confined to the pages of the Evening World. By 6 August 1908 sportswriters of the Trenton Evening Times in New Jersey were writing about his visiting and watching the Trenton team play, but the name was switched to Mulligan, either through error or to avoid potential copyright infringement:

To decide a bet will James Carmody state whether he had rubber in his hand when the fly bounded out of his grub hook in the early part of the game or was it just an ordinary glove. Swat Mulligan, who was a guest of Robert Bonham, says it would be impossible for a ball to bound off an ordinary glove in such a lively manner. Other well informed persons did not hesitate to make the statement that nothing ever got away from any reporter as fast as that ball bounced off Carmody’s hands.

And two days later the Trenton paper was calling batters who hit well in a game by the name:

Who is “Swat Mulligan?”
———
Magoon.
———
How many hits did Trenton get yesterday?
———
Five.
———
Who got four of ‘em?
———
Magoon.
———
Guess Magoon is “Swat Mulligan,” all right.
———
Perhaps you don’t know the story of “Swat Mulligan”?
———
Ask Bob Bonham, he tells it in his sleep.

And by the end of that baseball season, on 22 November 1908, the Duluth News-Tribune was giving Mulligan a mythic (and by today’s standards very politically incorrect) origin among the prehistoric Moundbuilders in what is now the American Midwest:

Those who have seen fit to doubt the existence of either Swat Milligan, the Peerless Poison Oaks or the Willow Swamp league, may put their fears at rest [....]

It is recorded that a man named Swat Mulligan, a paleface, appeared in the line-up of the Indiana Mound Builders on a certain bright day in June. At that time only 50 players were allowed on a side. It was in the seventh inning that Mulligan came to bat, and he mounted one of the mounds that all might see him work. An Indian pitcher by the name of Man-Afraid-His-Ribs-Might-Cave-In began to wind up with the wooden ball. He finally shot one over and Mulligan smashed it so clean that it looked like a broken clay pigeon. The fielders immediately began gathering up the splinters to use for firewood and the umpire tossed Man-Afraid-His-Ribs-Might-Cave-In another ball. This pitcher was called “Mana” for short by the fans. Again Mulligan tore the sphere to splinters.

Within a few years, Swat Mulligan memorabilia was available for sale. The Tacoma Times of 7 July 1911 ran this advertisement:

Swat Mulligan Dolls that you can’t break. Choice . . 98c

This was the “dead-ball era” of baseball. So, while Milligan’s power with the bat seems hyperbolically absurd today, it was even more so back then, when home runs were a rare occurrence. While the stories of Swat Mulligan are all but forgotten today, he was huge in his day, he was Babe Ruth before there was Babe Ruth.

And by the end of the decade, mulligan was being used to mean a hard-hit ball. On 12 April 1919, the Colorado Springs Gazette ran a story that compared baseball and cricket. It used mulligan to mean a hard-hit ball in cricket, but since there are few, if any, uses of mulligan in that sport, this particular instance probably reflects baseball slang of the era:

There is little about cricket that calls for brain work. An Englishman does not care for games that make any demand upon his mental faculties. At the bat he rarely figures “what is coming.” If it is a good ball “on the wicket” liable to knock the wickets down. If he misses it, he will carefully poke out his bat and just stop the ball. A fielder picks it up and returns it to the bowler. No running. And so on.

If it is a bad ball, “off the wicket,” he may take a “mulligan” at it and knock it over the fence, “out of bounds” they call it.

The term jumps to golf later that year with a pair of articles by sportswriter William Abbott in the Evening World in which he dubs two different golfers as the Swat Mulligan of the links. The first is on 13 June 1919 and refers to golfer Walter Hagen:

Famous as a long driver, a favorite Hagen trick is to let opponents lead him from the tee to the point where they start pressing in anxiety to rub it in. Then the Detroit wizard simply lets out a few kinks and its good night for the foolish golfer who thought he could outdistance the Swat Mulligan of the links.

The second, from 22 August 1919, refers to Dave Herron:

Woody Platt of Philadelphia came in for luncheon four holes down to Dave Herron of the Home club. The former, a newcomer to tournament golf, failed to get his strokes working in good shape against the long hitting Herron, who is the real Swat Mulligan of the links.

And the term is applied to the real-life Swat Mulligan, Babe Ruth, in the Evening World of 13 March 1920. The article refers to Ruth’s ability to hit a long ball in both baseball and golf in this headline:

LONG-RANGE HIT RECORD FOR BASEBALL AND GOLF RUTH’S CHIEF AMBITION

Famous “Babe” Has Natural Form for Walloping Home Runs, but on Links He’s Developed Special Style That Drives the Little Ball Over 300 Yards—Yankee Star Confident of Flashing New Swat Mulligan Stuff This Year in Both Baseball and Golf.

Ruth was not the only baseball player to take up golf in his spare time. And in the Detroit Free Press of 13 October 1931, we see mulligan applied to a do-over golf stroke for the first time. The passage is about New York Yankee Sammy Byrd playing in a pro-am golf tournament:

All were waiting to see what Byrd would do on the 290-yard 18th, with a creek in front of the well-elevated green. His first drive barely missed carrying the creek and he was given a “mulligan” just for fun. The second not only was over the creek on the fly but was within a few inches of the elevated green. That’s some poke!

Note that the general use here is that of a long drive from the tee, but the particular context is that of a handicap of a free stroke, so this is a transitional use of the word. Despite relying on a mulligan in this pro-am tournament, Byrd was an exceptional golfer who didn’t need the handicap. He would go on to win six PGA tournaments after he retired from baseball.

This appearance of mulligan in the sense of a do-over stroke antedates the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary by several years. The one in the OED is from the Texas Big Spring Daily Herald of 5 May 1936 in an article about a staffer for President Franklin Roosevelt playing golf:

Following McIntyre around a few holes of golf frequently rewards the gallery with such irate remarks as “Nuts, I’ve had 10 strokes on this hole already; I’ll pick up.” He seems to find new hop on the next tee—that is, until his tee shot.

Another McIntyre-ism is the use of the “mulligan”—links-ology for a second shot employed after a previously dubbed shot. Most McIntyre “mulligans” are worse dubbed that the initial shot, however—which seems to serve as a psychological encouragement to the presidential attache.

So, that’s where golf’s mulligan comes from. It evolved from the name of fictional long-ball hitter in baseball, came to mean a hard-hit ball, and then transferred over from baseball to golf. From its initial golfing meaning of a long tee-shot, it came to mean a second chance to hit a long ball after muffing a drive. In other words, a golfer who screws up is given another chance to hit a mulligan.

I can’t leave the subject, however, without mention of the two golfers who are most often said to have lent their name to the mulligan. Both claimed to have been the originators, but only many decades after the fact.

Hotelier David Mulligan claimed to have coined it after taking a second shot in a regular game with his regular foursome at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York. But he didn’t start playing with this particular foursome until 1932, a year after the term is recorded to mean a do-over stroke in golf. Furthermore, he didn’t claim to have originated it until 1952. Memories are malleable, and it is likely he mis-remembered an incident where the then-new slang term was used in jocular reference to his surname.

The second is John A. “Buddy” Mulligan, who worked as a locker-room attendant at the Essex Fells Country Club in New Jersey in the 1930s. He would occasionally be called upon to fill out a foursome and was given a free second shot as a handicap. He dates his claim, with no confirmable evidence, from the “mid-1930s,” again too late to be the origin. And he didn’t start making his claim until the 1970s, so his story shares that problem with David Mulligan’s. And in both of these claims it seems highly unlikely that a slang term from a handful of amateur golfers would quickly spread throughout the entire golfing world.

In contrast, the New York Evening World origin comes with verifiable citations charting the term’s development, a wide readership, imitations by other sportswriters, and a Swat Mulligan fad of large proportions, all firmly establishing the connection between mulligan and a hard-hit ball, before it ever comes close to a golf course.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Abbott, William. “Jones is Leading Fownes by Single Hole in Golf Play.” Evening World (New York), 22 August 1919, 2. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historical American Newspapers.

Abbott, William. “Walter Hagen Enters British Open Tourney Scheduled Next Spring.” Evening World (New York), 13 June 1919, 22. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historical American Newspapers.

Bulger, Bozeman. “Scientific Batter! You Bet; Swat Milligan Was Real One.” Evening World (New York), 26 May 1908, 12. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Bulger, Bozeman. “Swat Milligan Put the Shoe Stores Out of Business with Home-Run Hit.” Evening World (New York), 8 June 1908, 8. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Drukenbrod, M. F. “Beaupres Step Some.” Detroit Free Press, 13 October 1931, 16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Edgren, Robert. “Long-Range Hit Record for Baseball and Golf Ruth’s Chief Ambition.” Evening World (New York) 13 March 1920, 8. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historical American Newspapers.

“Golfers Try to Lower Marks.” Big Spring Daily Herald (Texas), 5 May 1936, 4. Newspaperarchive.com.

“The Man in the Grand Stand.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 6 August 1908, 11. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Man in the Grand Stand.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 8 August 1908, 11. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, s.v. mulligan, n.2.

Reitan, Peter (a.k.a. Peter Jensen Brown). “Hey Mulligan Man! — a Second Shot at the History of Taking a “Mulligan.” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 8 May 2017.

“Ryner Malstrom” (advertisement). Tacoma Times (Washington), 7 July 1911, 6. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historical American Newspapers.

Sheridan, J. B. “Why Our Baseball Is Better Than British Cricket.” Colorado Springs Gazette, 19 April 1919, 12. Readex: America’s Historic Newspapers.

“Swat Mulligan Played on Moundbuilders’ Team.” Duluth News-Tribune (Minnesota), 22 November 1908, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Bozeman Bulger, The Evening World (New York), 8 June 1908, 8. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Public domain image.

mortgage

A house with a “For Sale” sign posted in front of it

24 May 2021

A reader wrote me asking about mortgage. It seems she was conversing with someone from Holland and upon telling him that her husband was a mortgage broker, the Dutchman assumed he was a mortician. She wanted to know where the word mortgage came from and if it was etymologically related to mortician and mortuary. The short answer is that it is.

A mortgage is a debt secured with lien on property; in present-day use the word is usually applied to real estate transactions. It is a compound found in Anglo-Norman, from mort (dead) + gage (pledge). The French word is modeled after the medieval Latin phrase mortuum vadium, which also means dead pledge. Dead would seem to be a strange term to apply to a loan, but it is “dead” for two reasons: the property is forfeit or dead to the borrower if the loan is not repaid, and the pledge itself is dead if the loan is repaid.

The Anglo-Norman word is recorded in a legal document from 1293, during the reign of Edward I:

Un Adam bayla a B. une tere en morgage pur un soume de deners.

(One Adam delivered to B. a piece of land in mortgage for a sum of money.)

In English, the earliest extant use of mortgage is in a figurative sense, referring to a marriage vow. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession), written sometime before 1393, includes this passage:

Forthi scholde every good man knowe
And thenke, hou that in mariage
His trouthe plight lith in morgage,
Which if he breke, it is falshode,
And that descordeth to manhode,
And namely toward the grete,
Wherof the bokes alle trete.

(Therefore, every good man should know
And think, how that in marriage
His sworn vow lies in mortgage,
Which if he breaks, it is a falsehood,
And that is at odds with manhood,
And namely toward the sorrow,
Of which the books all discuss.)

The legal sense of the word may have been in English use prior to this, but perhaps not. In the fourteenth century, most English legal documents would have been written in Anglo-Norman, or perhaps Latin, and Gower, who wrote poetry in Latin, French, and English, may have been the first to take this word across the linguistic boundary between the languages. In any case, the legal sense in English is recorded from c.1400, shortly after Gower wrote that poem.

The English legal sense appears in the Book of Vices and Virtues, written c.1400, in a section about the evils of usury:

Suche folke doþ moche harm, for bi cause of terme of payment þat þei ȝyueþ, þei destroieþ þe peple, and namely pore knyȝtes and squyers, and also grete lordes þat ben ȝong and gon to iustynge & turnemens, and ouuer pe grete see and in-to Prus; for þei taken hem ofte here londes and rentes and grete heritages in wedde and in dede wedde, as morgage, and bi lettres of sale, þat ben lost for euere-more, for þei mowe not quyte hem at þe terme.

(Such folk do much harm, because of the terms of payment that they give; they destroy the people, namely poor knights and squires, and also great lords who are young and to joustings and tournaments over the great sea and into Prussia, for they often take from them their lands and rents and great heritages in surety and in dead surety, as in a mortgage, and by letters of sale that are lost for evermore, for they cannot pay them at the term.)

The monk and poet John Lydgate uses the term c. 1435 in a poetic letter to the Duke of Gloucester. The letter is a complaint to the purse, a common medieval genre of poetry in which the poet begs money from a wealthy patron. Unlike Gower, in this poem Lydgate is using the word in the legal sense:

Harde to likke hony out of a marbil stoon,
For ther is nouthir licour nor moisture;
An ernest grote, whan it is dronke and goon,
Bargeyn of marchauntys, stant in aventure;
My purs and I be callyd to the lure
Off indigence, our stuff leyd in morgage.
But ye, my Lord, may al our soor recure,
With a receyt of plate and of coignage.

(It is hard to lick honey out of a marble stone,
For there is neither liquor nor moisture;
An earnest coin, when it is drunk and gone,
A merchant’s deal, is lost;
My purse and I are called to the lure
Of indigence, our possessions laid in mortgage,
But you my lord, may heal all our sores,
With a sum of plate and coinage.)

The < t > starts being added, morgage becoming mortgage, in the mid sixteenth century in imitation of the Latin. It was common in the Early Modern period to alter the spelling of words to better match the Latin roots.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. morgage.

Francis, W. Nelson, ed. Book of Vices and Virtues. Early English Text Society O.S. 217. London: Humphrey Milford, 1942, 31–32. HathiTrust Digital Archive. San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 147.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis, vol. 3 of 3. Russell A. Peck, ed. Andrew Galloway, trans. 7.4226–32. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3. 

Horwood, Alfred J., ed. Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the First. Years 21 and 22. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyker, 1866, 17. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.7.14.

Lydgate, John. “Lydgate’s Letter to Gloucester.” The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, vol. 2 of 2. Henry N. MacCracken, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 192. London: Humphrey Milford, 1934, 666. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, MS Harley 2255.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. morgage, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. mortage, n.; December 2020, s.v. mortgage, v.

Photo credit: Philippe Giabbanelli, 2009. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Carolina, North and South / Roanoke

Detail of 1590 map of a region that would become part of North Carolina, showing Roanoke island (spelled Roanoac on the map)

21 May 2021

The states of North Carolina and South Carolina have been, at various times, named after three different kings named Charles—Carolus being the Latin form of that name. As such colonies are constructs of the European colonists, there are no indigenous names for the entire territory that would become the colonies and states, but the English colonists did adopt an indigenous toponym, Roanoke, for their first colony in what would become the Carolinas.

The first of the kings to give his name to Carolina was King Charles IX of France. In 1562, French explorer and colonizer Jean Ribault established a short-lived settlement, Charlesfort, on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina. The colonists abandoned the settlement the following year. The site was later occupied by the Spanish, who dubbed their settlement Santa Elena. The French settlement is documented in Samuel Purchas’s 1625 anthology of accounts of the exploration of the Americas:

With another Parcoussy they saw one old Father blind with age, but liuing, and of his loines sixe generations descended, all present, so that the Sonne of the eldest was supposed two hundred and fiftie yeeres old. They planted themselues on this Riuer of May, and there built a Fort which they called Carolina of their King Charles.

The first attempt at colonization by the English in North America was the ill-fated Roanoke colony, established on the island of that name. There were actually two Roanoke colonies. The first was established by Ralph Lane in 1585, but that was abandoned the following year and the colonists returned to England. The second, more famous, colony was established by Walter Raleigh in 1587. A resupply mission the following year was aborted due to war with Spain (i.e., the Spanish Armada), and when a relief expedition was made in 1590, it found the colonists had disappeared. To this day their fate is unknown, but they most likely were assimilated into the indigenous population.

Roanoke is an Algonquian place name, probably derivative of rawranoke, a word meaning shells or beads made from shells, presumably because shells were found or turned into beads on the island. In his 1624 history of Virginia, John Smith documents the native origin of the name:

With so much as we could carry we returned to our bote, kindly requiting this kinde king and all his kinde people. The cause of this discovery was to search this mine, of which Newport did assure vs that those small baggs (we had giuen him) in England he had tryed to hold halfe siluer; but all we got proued of no value: also to search what furrs, the best whereof is at Cuscarawaoke, where is made so much Rawranoke or white beads that occasion as much dissention among the the Salvages [sic], as gold and siluer amongst Christians.

Cuscarawaoke may be the actual indigenous toponym for island where rawranoke was acquired or manufactured.

The second king who lent his name to the future states was Charles I of England. In 1629, he granted a patent to Robert Heath to form a colony named after himself:

Know that we of our free grace certain knowledge & meere motion doe thinke fit to erect the sayd Region Territory & Isles into a Province & by the fulnes of our power & Kingly Authority for us our heires & successors, we doe erect & incorporate them into a province & name the same Carolina or the province of Carolina & the foresaid Isles the Carolarns Islands & soe we will that in all times hereafter they shall be named.

Charles I, of course, lost his head in the English Civil War, and following Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, his son, Charles II, granted a new charter for the colony in 1663, naming it for himself, the third King Charles in our story:

And that the country, thus by us granted and described, may be dignified by us with as large titles and priviledges as any other part of our dominions and territories in that region, Know ye, that we of our further grace, certain knowledge, and meer motion, have thought fit to erect the same tract of ground, county, and island, into a province, and out of the fulness of our royal power and prerogative, we do, for us, our heirs and successors, erect, incorporate and ordain the same into a province, and call it the Province of Carolina, and so from henceforth will have it called.

The colony was divided into North Carolina and South Carolina in 1729.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004, s.v. Roanoke.

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

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 4 of 5. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 1603–04. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Saunders, William L., ed. “The First Charter Granted by King Charles the Second, to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina” (24 March 1663). The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 1 of 10. Raleigh: P.M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886, 23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “Sir Robert Heath’s Patent, 5 Charles 1st” (30 October 1629). The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 1 of 10. Raleigh: P.M. Hale, Printer to the State, 1886, 7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Smith, John. The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles. London: John Dawson and John Haviland for Michael Sparkes, 1624, 58. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Theodor de Bry, 1590. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

monkey wrench / throw a monkey wrench into

A page from a machinist’s textbook showing a monkey wrench (left) compared to a Stillson or pipe wrench (right). Both are adjustable wrenches, but the monkey wrench is designed to grip straight surfaces, like hex bolts. The pipe wrench permits some play in the jaws, allowing it to grip circular surfaces, like pipes.

18 May 2021

[19 May 2021: added reference and link to Peter Reitan’s blog; 20 May 2021: added minor clarifications and corrections to the likely/unlikely origins]

A monkey wrench is a type of adjustable wrench or spanner. And to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery is a metaphor for disrupting something, a metaphor of throwing a heavy metal object into machinery. The term originated in Britain, although nowadays it’s primarily found in North American speech and writing.

Why it is called a monkey wrench is uncertain, and there are a number of possibilities, as well as a series of false etymologies based on the name of its supposed inventor. Among the likely origins are that the wrench could be so called because it is a metal object that moves up and down a vertical shaft, not unlike a monkey climbing up and down a tree. Others have observed that the head of the wrench resembles a monkey’s head. (I don’t really see it, but okay. It’s a valid opinion.)

What we do know for sure about the origins is that the term is recorded in England in the early nineteenth century. There is a record of a Richard Fleetwood of Parr and Rainford manufacturing monkey wrenches. He was in business by 1807, although if he was making monkey wrenches as early as that year we don’t know. We do, however, have a definitive use of monkey wrench in the Chester Chronicle of 4 August 1826 in a list of seventeen defendants on trial for various crimes:

13. Andrew Sealion, (27) stabbing David Rogers.
14. William Poole, (50) stealing a candlestick, the property of Daniel Poole.
15. William Darlington, (60) stealing a monkey wrench, the property of the Canal Company.
16. John Phelan, (17) stealing £70. 7s. 10d. the monies of John Finchett-Maddock.

Monkey wrench appears in North America by 1838. The following advertisement appears in the Natchez Daily Courier (Mississippi) on 20 September 1838:

HARDWARE.
CARPENTERS knob-locks, flush bolts, cast butts, monkey wrenches, hand-cuffs, Salters Patent Spring balances; with a large and general assortment of Carpenters tools for sale by
sept 20                         PATTERSON & WISWALL

The following odd legal notice appears in the New York Evening Post on 31 May 1839, announcing a lawsuit having been filed against an assortment of property that includes a monkey wrench. Under U.S. law it is possible to sue property, especially when the ownership of the property is to be decided by the court. In the notice, the word libel is being used to mean a written complaint, not an accusation of defamation:

Whereas a libel hath been filed in the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York, on the 24th day of May, A.D. 1839, by Gabriel Dissossway, Libellant, on behalf of himself and others, the crew of the schooner Elisha Ruckman, against 5 Spanish hides, 1 barrel of brown sugar, 2 harness casks, 7 sails[?], 14 yards of canvass, ship’s side steps, side skids, 18 fathom square sail halyard, 10 pounds of rope yarn, 8 pounds spun yarn, 1 keg, 1 tea cannister, 1 oil can, 2 jugs of oil, 12 purchase blocks, 2 barrels, 1 monkey wrench, 2 ship’s scrapers, shovel, a part of the cargo of the schooner La Bruce[?].

And whereas the substance of the said libel is, that the Libellant, with others of the crew of the said schooner Elisha Ruckman, on or about the 21st of April 1839, on the high seas fell on[?] with the schooner La Bruce[?], totally abandoned and derelict, that they then boarded her and towed her into port, with the articles before enumerated, and praying that said articles may be condemned and sold to pay the Libellants a reasonable salvage for the same.

And we get a formal definition in an 1858 Dictionary of Trade Products:

MONKEY-WRENCH, a spanner with a moveable jaw.

One explanation for the term that appears as a suggestion in some major dictionaries is that monkey has been used to refer to menial laborers since the seventeenth century, so the wrench could be one used by such laborers. This, however, is somewhat doubtful, as these instances are few, and invariably refer to jobs commonly performed by children (e.g., powder monkey), who can be likened to monkeys.

It is often claimed that the monkey wrench is named after its inventor, either a Charles Moncke or any number of others with a similar name. There is no evidence supporting any of these claims, and in all the claims that I have seen, the inventor is said to be an American and to have invented it on a date after we find the term in print. Given the wide variety of claims, the fact that the proffered names are invariably American when monkey wrench first appears in Britain, and the claimed invention sometimes coming decades after the actual invention, we can confidently dismiss these claims as false.

Another false etymology is that monkey wrench is a racial slur because it was invented by former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, a Black man. Johnson did patent a type of wrench in 1922, but as we’ve seen, this was about a century after the wrench’s invention. There is no evidence linking monkey wrench to the racial slur monkey.

As for throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery, that idiom is an Americanism that appears in the late nineteenth century. The earliest use I have found is ambiguous, in that it is not clear whether the use is metaphorical or if an actual monkey wrench were dropped into a printing press. The context is the Boston mayoral election of 1884. From the Marion Daily Star of 9 October 1889:

M. J. Kiley, the Boston Democrat who was to print ballots for both sides in the election when O’Brien was first made mayor, but who dropped a monkey wrench into the press before the Republican ballots were run off may be there.

It appears again in the San Francisco Chronicle of 6 July 1892. Again, the context is that of politics, but here the use is clearly metaphorical, the machinery being that of the legislative process:

Bland’s action in insisting upon amending the Stewart bill has been severely criticised. He is charged with occupying the position of the man who threw a monkey-wrench into a threshing machine because he was not allowed to feed it. The trouble with Bland seems to be that it is Stewart’s bill and not his. He wants all the fame, even if he jeopardizes the cause in which he proposes to lead.

The British version, throw a spanner into, appears later, although that co-location of words referring to a literal throwing of a wrench appears a bit earlier. In a London Times article from 27 April 1879 about an explosion at Woolrich Arsenal:

An inquest was held at Woolrich on Tuesday relative to the death of Johnson, a lad employed in the cartridge factory of the Royal Arsenal, who died on Monday from injuries received through an explosion on Saturday. The lad had stated after the accident that it was caused by his throwing a spanner into a box in the workshop, and that something in the box immediately exploded; but the evidence pointed to a different conclusion.

The metaphorical use of the British version is recorded in a 1925 story by Owen Collinson:

Hugh sat and gazed with outraged eyes at this wrecker of his life. A vision of Joyce came to him, and his heart sank as he told himself for the thousandth time that she was lost to him for ever. And Wilfred had done it—this pale little man who lad meddled with forces unimaginably beyond his comprehension, like some small boy light-heartedly throwing a spanner into a mighty dynamo and causing immense disruption.

Peter Jensen Brown’s (a.k.a. Peter Reitan) Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog has more on monkey wrenches, including some other plausible (but still unsupported with evidence) hypotheses as to why they are called that.

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Sources:

Advertisement. Natchez Daily Courier (Mississippi), 20 September 1838. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Chester Summer Sessions.” Chester Chronicle (England), 4 August 1826, 3. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Collinson, Owen. “The Perfect Friend.” Sunday Pictorial (London), 8 March 1925, 16. Gale Primary Sources: Mirror Historical Archive.

Dane, E. Surrey. Peter Stubs and the Lancashire Hand Tool Industry. Altrincham, UK: John Sherratt and Son, 1973, 219.

Evon, Dan. “Did Jack Johnson Invent the Monkey Wrench?” Snopes.com, 14 December 2015.

“Explosion at the Woolrich Arsenal.” Sunday Times (London), 27 April 1879, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Sunday Times Historical Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. monkey, v.

“Our New York Letter.” Marion Daily Star (Ohio), 9 October 1889, 3.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. monkey wrench, n.; March 2021, s.v. monkey, n., monkey, v.

“Silver Men United.” San Francisco Chronicle, 6 July 1892, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Simmonds, P. L. A Dictionary of Trade Products. London: G. Routledge, 1858, 251. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Staten, Vince. Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench. New York: Touchstone, 1996, 41–43.

Stimpson, George. A Book About a Thousand Things. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946, 287. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of ‘Throw a Monkey Wrench Into’: Threshing Machines.” Wordhistories.net, 25 May 2018.

Waddell, Wm. Coventry H., U.S. Marshal. “Southern District of New York.” Evening Post (New York), 31 May 1839, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Rogers, William. The Progressive Machinist: A Practical and Educational Treatise, with Illustrations. New York: Theodore Audel, 1903, 172. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Public domain image.

morphology

20 May 2021

Sometimes the person who has coined a word is not someone you would suspect of doing so. Such is the case with morphology, the study of structure and forms and their relationship to one another. Morphology is used in both biology and linguistics. The coiner of the word, though, is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of the novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) and the play Faust. While Goethe is most famous for his literary output, he also produced a number of scientific works. He was quite the polymath.

The word Morphologie appears in Goethe’s biological notes in 1796, and it appears in an 1807 published note by him:

Man findet daher in dem Gange der Kunst, des Wissens und der Wissenschaft mehrere Versuche, eine Lehre zu gründen und auszubilden, welche wir die Morphologie nennen möchten.

(One finds, therefore, in the course of art, knowledge, and science several attempts to establish and develop a discipline that we shall call morphology.)

English, however, did not borrow the word directly from the German; French intervened. Morphology first appeared in English in 1828 in a translation of Hippolyte Cloquet’s Traité d’Anatomie Descriptive (Treatise on Descriptive Anatomy):

The numerous organs of which the human body consists, we shall consider principally with reference to the forms which they present, and the mutual relations which they possess; and this view of the subject is what constitutes Descriptive Anatomy, properly so called, which as itself capable of being divided into the Particular Anatomy of Organs, or Morphology, and the Anatomy of Regions or Topographical Anatomy, if we may use the expression; while that part of the science which treats of the structure and properties of the different tissues which are common to several organs, takes the name of General Anatomy or Histology. To the latter belongs the examination of the general characters of all the organs and humours.

Morphology is also used in linguistics, the study of word roots and affixes (i.e., morphemes) and their relationships, as opposed to a word’s phonetic properties. Again, this use of the word first appears in German, in August Schleicher’s 1859 Zur Morphologie der Sprache (On the Morphology of Language):

Den gegenstand der morphologie der sprache bildet die lautliche form des wortes, seine äußere gestalt, d. h. das vorhandensein oder felen seiner teile und die stellung, welche dise teile ein nemen; unberüksichtigt laßen wir das material, auß dem das wort gebildet ist, den klang der zum aufbau desselben verwanten lautelemente.

(The object of study of the morphology of the language is the phonetic form of the word, its external gestalt, i.e., the existence or absence of its parts and the position these parts take; we do not take into account the material out of which the word is constructed, the sound of the phonemes used to construct it.)

That same year, clergyman and philologist Frederic Farrar used morphology and morphological in a series of lectures given at the Royal Institution in March 1859. The lectures were published in 1870. Now, it’s a dirty little secret that the field of linguistics, or philology as it was once known, was established on foundations of nineteenth-century racism and nationalism, an attempt at using language to prove a theory of white supremacy. While the field has moved away from these roots, racist vestiges guiding teaching and research can still be found. Farrar’s lecture, however, presents these abhorrent ideas in raw, unvarnished form. In the following passage, he openly discounts the value of “non-Aryan-Semitic” cultures, and praises the white colonizers for their “heroic” work in studying and preserving those lesser languages:

But while at first the mind may almost seem to sink bewildered before the numberless multitudes of tribes like these—tribes which have contributed nothing to the progress or enlightenment of the human race—tribes which have succeeded others which seem if possible to have been even lower still, and which once covered such colossal spaces of the earth's surface in every stage of nomad unprogressiveness or squalid savagery—yet even here Philology has not resigned her task, and here also she has some of her highest lessons to teach, lessons which have been won in many a year of terrible hardship and perilous fatigue, by many an heroic missionary and intrepid pioneer. And so completely has the earth been traversed over its remotest regions, and pierced to its extremest solitudes, that it is probable that there is no mode of human speech of which, in some of its dialects, we do not now possess vocabularies and specimens. Now no absolute morphological* classification of the non-Aryo-Semitic languages is possible; no firm and definite lines of demarcation can be drawn between the outlying members and debateable lands of the separate linguistic kingdoms.

* By the morphology of a language we mean the general laws of its grammatical structure.

Sometimes word origins come from unexpected directions. It’s no surprise that Goethe coined a word, but the fact that it was morphology is.

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Sources:

Cloquet, Hippolyte. A System of Human Anatomy. Robert Knox, trans. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1830, 2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Farrar, Frederic W. Families of Speech: Four Lectures Delivered Before the Royal Institution of Great Britain in March 1859. London: Longmans, Green, 1870, 159–60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Schriften Zur Morphologie II. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche. 15. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. morphology, n.

Schleicher, August. Zur Morphologie der Sprache. Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pétersbourg, series 7, vol. 1, no. 7. St. Petersburg: Eggers, 1859, 1.  HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828, oil on canvas. Neue Penakothek, Munich. Public domain image.