woke

A 7 July 2016 protest over the police shooting of Philando Castile, a Black man, during a routine traffic stop the previous day. Two women among a crowd of protesters hold up a sign that reads “#JusticeForPhilando” and has an image of a fist rising out the state of Minnesota.

31 May 2021

Woke is an adjective, originating in Black slang, meaning being alert to racism and racial discrimination. It has been circulating for decades, but in recent years it has been taken up by white speakers, and the contexts in which it is used has expanded to other areas of injustice and discrimination. This adjectival use of woke is clearly documented from the early 1960s, but it is possible that it is older in oral use.

The adjective comes, of course, from the past participle of the verb to wake. The verb can be traced back to the Old English verb wæcnan. Originally in Black English, the adjective was used literally, to mean awake, as opposed to being asleep. The earliest example I can find is in the 1891 Joel Chandler Harris’s short story “Balaam and His Master”:

An’ den, when I git my belly full, I sot in de sun an’ went right fast ter sleep. I ’spec’ I tuck a right smart nap, kaze when some un hollered at me an’ woke me up de sun wuz gwine down de hill right smartly. I jumped up on my feet, I did, an’ I say, ‘Who dat callin’ me?’ Somebody ’low, ‘Yo’marster want you.’ Den I bawl out, ‘Is Marse Berry come?’ De n[——]s all laugh, an’ one un ‘em say, Dat n[——] man dreamin’, mon. He ain’t woke good yit.’

Harris was, of course, white and recording/imitating Black speech. I cannot find an early example by a Black writer. The search is complicated because relatively few outlets of the day published Black slang, and sifting out the slang adjectival uses from the much more common uses of the verb is an almost hopeless task.

This literal sense of the adjective woke appears in a 19 April 1928 piece syndicated to white newspapers. Its inclusion in a gossip column about the goings-on in Manhattan is, perhaps, intended to make fun of Black dialect. The usage is literal in that the event goes on all night long and the attendees literally stay awake, but one wonders if it also reflects a metaphorical sense that may have been current in slang at the time:

The Harlem Black Belt this week offered gaudy posters reading: The Stay Woke Ball—open from 5 o'clock p.m. until 5 a.m. the next morning.

The transition from the literal to the metaphorical meaning can be seen in this 13 March 1943 article in the Norfolk Journal and Guide that quotes Black writer and educator J. Saunders Redding. Redding’s use here is a deliberate metaphor, likening becoming aware of racism and white supremacy to that of waking from sleep. Again, this is not quite the adjectival use, but it is either a precursor to that or Redding could be reflecting an existing slang usage in more a formal style:

These lessons mean that the Negro is coming to have “a faith in organized labor as a force for social justice. They mean what a United Mine Workers official in West Virginia told me in 1940: Let me tell you buddy, Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer,” he said.

Clear use of the metaphorical woke itself is recorded by Black novelist William Melvin Kelley in the New York Times on 20 May 1962. Kelley wrote an article on Black slang with the title “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” Accompanying the article is a short glossary of slang terms that includes this entry:

woke (adj.): well-informed, up-to-date (“Man, I’m woke”).

Kelley didn’t explicitly define woke in terms of injustice or racism, but one can certainly infer that is the intended context.

Ten years later, the connection of woke to racial injustice is clear when Black playwright Barry Beckham includes this line in the prologue to his 1972 play Garvey Lives!:

I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk.

Woke moves out of the province of American Black speech and starts appearing with great frequency in English-language publications around 2015. And it is around this time that the word starts being used in contexts other than racism in the United States. For example, this passage appears in the South African Mail & Guardian Thought Leader in a 23 October 2015 article about women protesting increases in university tuition and fees:

This time around women are woke to this (as the cool kids say) and refuse to be silenced, refuse history to repeat itself. At Wits women who were told they could not lead the songs, went and sang their own. And online, women were challenging the “behind-the-scenes” narrative with hashtags such as #MbokodoLead.

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Sources:

“Deep Changes in Thinking Bringing Dread to White South—Redding.” Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Virginia), 13 March 1943, A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

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

Harris, Joel Chandler. “Balaam and His Master.” Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891, 34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kelley, William Melvin. “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” New York Times Magazine, 20 May 1962, SM45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “‘Saying Something Lexicon.’” New York Times Magazine, 20 May 1962, SM45. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

McIntyre, O.O. “New York Day By Day.” Portsmouth Daily Times, 19 April 1928, 20. NewspaperArchive.com.

Mugo, Kagure. “#FeesMustFall: You Cannot Ask Women to Be Vocal in Public and Silent in Private.” Mail & Guardian Thought Leader, 23 October 2015.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2019, s.v. woke, adj.2.

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue, 2016. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Wisconsin

Detail of a c.1819 map of the Northwest Territory (i.e., what is now the state of Wisconsin) showing the Ouisconsin River

28 May 2021

[Edit, 9 June 2021: corrected a fact regarding Marquette’s death.]

The origin of the name Wisconsin is a mystery. Not only is its original meaning uncertain—a rather common occurrence with indigenous placenames—but which language it comes from is also in doubt—all a result of the casual disregard that early European explorers and colonists had for indigenous languages.

We do know that the name was first applied to the Wisconsin River. Many sources point to an Ojibwa (Chippewa) origin, but Michael McCafferty contends that the name is from the Miami-Illinois meeskohsinki meaning “it lies red,” probably a reference to the red sandstone banks along portions of the river. Other hypotheses about the original meaning include “gathering place of the waters.”

The first Europeans to record the name were Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673. A translation of their travel narrative from the French reads:

The river on which we embarked is called Meskousing. It is very wide; it has a sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that render its navigation very difficult. It is full of islands covered with vines. On the banks one sees fertile land, diversified with woods, prairies, and hills. There are oak, walnut, and basswood trees; and another kind, whose branches are armed with long thorns. We saw there neither feathered game nor fish, but many deer, and a large number of cattle.

Marquette died before he could return to Quebec, but Jolliet took the name Meskousing back with him. There René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle mistook Marquette’s and Jolliet’s <M> to be an <Ou> and rendered the name as Ouisconsing. Others followed Cavelier’s lead. That spelling was later Anglicized to <W> and the final <g> dropped.

The name appears in English by 1698 in Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America:

No Rivers, as I have already said, run into the Meschasipi between the river of the Illinois and the Fall of St. Anthony, from the Westward, but the River Ottenta, and another which falls into it within eight Leagues of the said Fall: But on the Eastward we met with a pretty large River, call'd Ouisconsin or Misconsin, which comes from the Northward. This River is near as large as that of the Illinois; but I cannot give an exact account of the length of its Course, for we left it about sixty Leagues from its Mouth, to make a Portage into another River, which runs into the Bay of Puans, as I shall observe when I come to speak of our return from Issati into Canada. This River Ouisconsin runs into the Meschasipi about 100 Leagues above that of the Illinois.

The area that would become the state of Wisconsin was acquired by the United States by the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. The area was called by various names until the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836. Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on 39 May 1848.

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Sources:

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

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

Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America Extending Above Four Thousand Miles Between New France and New Mexico. London: Printed for M. Bentley, et al., 1698, 180–181. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Marquette, Jacques and Louis Jolliet. “The Mississippi Voyage of Jolliet and Marquette, 1673.” Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634–1699. Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917, 235–36.

McCafferty, Michael. Native American Place-Names of Indiana. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2008, 190n.

———. “On Wisconsin: the Derivation and Referent of an Old Puzzle in American Placenames.” Onoma, 38, 2003, 39–56.

Image credit: Map of the North Western and Michigan Territories. Fielding Lucas and Bartholomew Welch, c.1819. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

Rhode Island / Aquidneck

Detail of a 1758 map showing the colony of Rhode Island. Aquidneck is labeled Rhode Island on this map.

28 May 2021

The origin of the name Rhode Island is uncertain. Not only is it the name of the state, but Rhode Island is a name for a large island at the mouth of Narragansett Bay whose indigenous name is Aquidneck. Aquidneck is an Algonquian word, probably Narragansett, meaning “on the island.”

The English colony there was founded by Roger Williams in 1636 after he was banished from Massachusetts Bay for his political opinions, which included complete separation from the Church of England, religious freedom, and equitable dealings with the indigenous population.

There are two competing explanations for the origin of the name Rhode Island that are commonly put forth, and both have similar problems that cast doubt on their being correct.

The first is that in 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano sighted what is now called Block Island, an island off the coast of and now belonging to the state and likened it to the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean. A translation of a 1524 letter from Verrazzanno to King Francis I of France, who funded his expedition, reads:

The anchor raised, sailing toward the east, as thus the land turned, having traveled LXXX leagues always in sight of it, we discovered an island triangular in form, distant ten leagues from the continent, in size like the island of Rhodes, full of hills, covered with trees, much populated by the continuous fires along all the surrounding shore which we saw they made. We baptized it in the name of your most illustrious mother [i.e., Louise of Savoy]; not anchoring there on account of the unfavorableness of the weather.

Note that Verrazzano did not name the island Rhodes; he just noted a similarity in size and position along the coast. While it is possible that Williams or one of his fellow colonists was aware of this reference and mistook the sighting of Block Island for Aquidneck, there is no evidence that directly links this offhand comment by the Florentine explorer to the English colonists who dubbed Aquidneck Rhode Island.

The second common explanation is that in 1614 Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, for whom Block Island is named, sighted an island in the mouth of Narragansett Bay and commented on its reddish color. Johannes de Laet’s 1625 Nieuvve Wereldt contains a detailed description of Narragansett Bay and references Aquidneck, noting its shores appeared red in color:

daer legt een rodlich Eylandeken dicht by.

(there lies a reddish island close by)

According to this explanation, the English name is an Anglicization of the Dutch Roodt Eylandt. But again, Block did not name the island Roodt Eylandt, and while it is more likely that the English colonists were familiar with de Laet’s book than with Verrazzanno’s letter (early colonists often read what accounts of the Americas that they could get their hands on), there is still no evidence that directly connects Block’s observation about the island’s color with the later English name. Wikipedia claims, without citation, that some Dutch maps from 1659 onward use the name Roodt Eylandt. But these maps, if they exist, postdate the English name.

One might also guess that the name comes from a person named Rhode or Rhodes, but no suitable candidate by that name exists in the records.

All we know is that by 1637 Williams and his fellow colonists were calling Aquidneck Rhode Island. From a 1 May 1637 letter from Williams to the governors of the Massachusetts Bay colony:

They also conceive it easy for the English, that the provisions and munition first arrive at Aquednetick, called by us Rode-Island, at the Nanhiggontick’s mouth, and then a messenger may be despatched hither, and so to the [Massachusetts] bay, for the soldiers to march up by land to the vessels, who otherwise might spend long time about the cape and fill more vessels than needs.

The island was officially named Rhode Island on 13 April 1644. From a court record of the colony of that date:

It is ordered by this Court, that the ysland commonly called Aquethneck, shall be from henceforth called the Isle of Rhodes or RHODE ISLAND.

In 1663, King Charles I of granted the colony a charter officially declaring its name as the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations:

And accordingly our will and pleasure is, and of our especial grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion, we have ordained, constituted and declared, and by these presents, for us, our heirs and successors, do ordain, constitute and declare: That they [...] are, or hereafter shall be, admitted and made free of the company and society of our colony of Providence Plantations, in the Narragansett Bay, in New England, shall be, from time to time, and forever hereafter, a body corporate and politic, in fact and name, by the name of the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, in America.

(I’ve omitted the long list of names of the company stockholders from the above.)

With the exception of changing colony to state, until 2020 the official name of the state had remained the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, giving the smallest state in the union the longest name. But in that year voters amended the state constitution, dropping the and Providence Plantations from the name, making the official name the State of Rhode Island. The impetus behind the change was unpleasant association of the word plantation with slavery. While we today commonly associate slavery with the southern states, those in the north were deeply implicated in the institution as well. Not only did northern states have slaves too, albeit in smaller numbers, but their economies were firmly enmeshed in the slave trade. For Rhode Island in particular, despite a short-lived 1652 law banning slavery in the colony, the colony and state had large numbers of slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the number declined precipitously in the nineteenth. Slavery in the state was not officially and finally abolished until 1842, and the ports of Rhode Island were important hubs in the transatlantic slave trade.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Bartlett, John Russell, ed. “At the General Court of Election held at Nuport on the 13th of the first month, 1644.” Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. 1 of 10. Providence: Crawford Greene and Brother, 1856, 127. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dezenski, Lauren. “Rhode Island Voters Approve Removing ‘Plantations’ from State’s Official Name over Concerns About the Word’s History.” CNN, 5 November 2020.

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

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

Laet, Johannes de. Nieuvve Wereldt (New World). Leiden: Isaack Elzevier, 1625, 85. ProQuest Early European Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, Rhode Island, n., Rhode Islander, n.

“Rhode Island’s Royal Charter” (1663). Rhode Island Department of State.

Verrazanno, Giovanni da. “Selections from a Letter of the Navigator Giovanni da Verrazano to the King of France, Francis I” (1524). Verrazano’s Voyage Along the Atlantic Coast of North America. Albany: U of the State of New York, 1916, 10. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Williams, Roger. Letter to Governor Henry Vane and Deputy Governor John Winthrop, 1 May 1637. The Correspondence of Roger Williams, vol. 1 of 2. Glenn W. LaFantasie, ed. Hanover, New Hampshire: Brown UP/UP of New England for the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1988, 73. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Library of Congress, Thomas Kitchin, 1758. Public domain image.

narc / nark

A Japanese poster advertising the 2002 movie Narc, directed by Joe Carnahan and starring Jason Patric and Ray Liotta. The fact that the only word not in Japanese is narc shows the global ubiquity of the word. The image on the poster is a photo of two men from the waists down. Both are carrying guns.

27 May 2021

In current use, narc or narco refers to a law enforcement agent who investigates illegal drug use or to a police informer. Narc is also a verb meaning to inform on someone. These senses are typically analyzed as a clipping of narcotics. But there is an older, mid nineteenth-century slang term, nark, which also means an informer, and the origin of this older nark is not so clear. In the 1950s, the urge to clip narcotics to narc found an existing term already there. So, the current use of narc has its origins in both the older term and the relatively more recent clipping.

One possibility is that this older nark comes from the Romani nak, meaning nose. The use of nose to mean an informer dates to the eighteenth century. The 1789 first edition of George Parker’s Life's Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life defines a nose as a “snitch.” And James Hardy Vaux’s 1819 Vocabulary of the Flash Language has these entries:

NOSE, a thief who becomes an evidence against his accomplices; also, a person who seeing one or more suspicious characters in the streets, makes a point of watching them in order to frustrate any attempt they may make, or to cause their apprehension; also, a spy or informer of any description.

NOSE, to nose, is to pry into any person’s proceedings in an impertinent manner. To nose upon any one, is to tell of any thing he has said or done with a view to injure him, or to benefit yourself.

On its face, it is reasonable to think that Roma criminals in England adopted nak as a calque for the slang sense of nose, and in turn nak made its way back into English criminal slang as nark. But there are two problems with this explanation. The first is that the shift from a short /o/ or /a/ in nak to the /aɹ/ in nark is unusual—not impossible, but odd. The second is that the earliest uses of nark in English are those of a miserly or otherwise unpleasant person. Given that dates of appearance of slang terms in print is at best only a fuzzy indication of when they were actually coined in speech, this does not rule out an origin in Romani, but it does cast doubt on it.  

The sense of nark meaning an unpleasant person is in place by the 1840s. From Swell’s Night Guide of 1849, an underground guidebook to bordellos and other disreputable establishments of London:

But since these mendedicity coves has come up—they are so down on us kids that its almost a gooser vith us. They are the rankest narks vot ever God put guts into, or ever farted in a kickses case; vell, so I’ve just come to beat this ere walk a bit.

TOTTY.—O! you’ll find a decent pad or two in this valk. But vot ever you does, don’t doss at that ere Trav’ler’s Rest—they calls it The Trav’ler’s Rest. Vhy, thunder my groggy! if any trav’ler gets rest there—why it is a reglar bug trap and a jumper valk and chat hutch, and stinks of crap and cag like a dunniken, and the donna of the ken is a dead crab, and a nark. I doss’d there von night—and send I may live, if I dropped my ogle slums once, and I couldn’t stall a paddle, coss they dubs the jigger, and scarpers with the screw. O she’s a thundering nark!

(Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang date this passage to 1846. They may have access to an earlier edition than I have. Green’s includes this passage under the definition of police informant, but the context is clearly that of a bad person, a thief.)

This sense of an unpleasant person is still in use in Australia & New Zealand.

Nark could also be used more specifically to mean a miser. From Henry Mayhew’s 1851 London Labour and the London Poor in a list of charitable people whom beggars could ask for money with reasonable chance of success:

Mrs. Taggart, Bayswater (her husband is a Unitarian minister, not so good as she, but he’ll stand a “bob” if you look straight at him and keep to one story.)

Archdeacon Sinclair, at Kensington (but not as good as Archdeacon Pott, as was there afore him; he was a good man; he couldn’t refuse a dog, much more a Christian; but he had a butler, a regular “knark,” who was a b— and a half, good weight.)

Lady Cottenham used to be good, but she is “coopered” (spoilt) now, without you has a “slum,” any one as she knows, and then she won’t stand above a “bull” (five shillings).

The spelling here of knark hints that it may be a borrowing from Danish, where knark also once meant miser, although it could just be a spelling variant; slang terms often have multiple and fanciful spellings in their early years. From Berthelson’s 1754 English-Danish dictionary:

SNUDGE, Sub. gammel knark.

Snudge had been English slang for a miser since the sixteenth century, and gammel is Danish for old. In present-day Danish, however, knark is slang for narcotics, showing that the same conflation of words happened in that that language too.

It’s a small step from underground slang for an unpleasant person to police informant, and the informer sense of nark is in place by the end of the 1850s. Here is an entry from Ducange Anglicus’s 1859 The Vulgar Tongue. He spells it nard, however, and whether that is an error on his or the printer’s part, or whether it reflects an actual pronunciation is uncertain:

NARD, n. A person who obtains information under seal of confidence, and afterwards breaks faith.

But we have the nark spelling the following year. From Hotten’s 1860 slang dictionary, entries that parallel Vaux’s earlier ones for nose:

NARK, a person in the pay of the police; a common informer; one who gets his living by laying traps for publicans, &c.

NARK, to watch, or look after, “NARK the titter;” watch the girl.

This informant sense of nark continues to the present day. It appears in a 1914 draft of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in a scene where Eliza Doolittle fears being arrested:

THE FLOWER GIRL Oh, sir, dont let him charge me. You dunno what it means to me. Theyll take away my character and drive me on the streets for speaking to gentlemen. They—

THE NOTE TAKER (coming forward on her right, the rest crowding after him) There, there, there, there! whos hurting you, you silly girl? What do you take me for?

THE BYSTANDER. It's all right: hes a gentleman: look at his boots. (Explaining to the note taker) She thought you was a copper's nark, sir.

THE NOTE TAKER (with quick interest) Whats a copper's nark?

THE BYSTANDER (inapt at definition) It's a—well, it's a copper's nark, as you might say. What else would you call it? A sort of informer.

There are later uses this sense of nark to be found, but as one proceeds into the latter half of the twentieth century, it becomes unclear where the older term gives way to the newer, narcotics one. And this older nark never gained a firm foothold in North America, being confined chiefly to Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

The use of narco to mean drugs, a straightforward clipping of narcotics, appears by the 1950s. In a letter of 12 January 1954 James Blake describes the police interrogating him:

They brought him in, someone I hardly knew, a wild-eyed savage hurling accusations of homosexual orgies spiced with all manner of narco. In the face of such a shocking and unexpected onslaught, I was commendably cool.

That same decade, narco would also come to mean a police narcotics officer. From an article about the beat poets by John Ciardi, published in the Saturday Review on 6 February 1960:

The G.I. generation had its potential rebellion largely blurred by army restrictions and could do little more than grumble or go AWOL on a binge, but that much at least they did manage regularly enough. The Beat Generation has marihuana and the ritual of dodging the “narcos”—the narcotics squad.

By the mid-1960s narco had been clipped even further to narc or nark. (The occasional <k> spelling is not necessarily connected to the older term; as mentioned, slang spelling, particularly in the early years of a term seeing print, is highly variable.) Timothy Leary uses it in his 1965 The Politics of Ecstasy, and here it is unclear if Leary is using the term to refer to law enforcement officers or paid informers:

Big power struggle over control of drugs in Washington. The narcotics bureau of the Treasury Department wanted to keep all drugs illegal, to step up law enforcement, add thousands of T-men, G-men and narks to the payroll. On the other hand, the medics and scientists in the government wanted the FDA to handle all drugs, including heroin, pot, LSD. Make it a medical matter.

And narc makes an appearance in the 1970 novel Shaft by Ernest Tidyman:

He was frightened and he wasn’t sure why. The police didn’t frighten him. The Narcs didn't frighten him. His own customers (who were capable of killing a man for a lot less than he usually carried) didn’t frighten him either. But Ben Buford did.

The shift from police officer to police informer, all in the context of illegal drugs, is definitely in place by the end of the 1970s. From the 1979 Angel Dust: An Ethnographic Study of PCP Users:

They start taking me to the police car and instantly, just like that, I just kind of came down. I came to and I was coherent. Wow, what's going on? Wow, you're going to arrest me. Gee, thanks for stopping me. God, I was thanking the guy, shaking his hand and all this stuff. He said I can see you're kind of back to normal now. He asked were drugs involved here tonight? Oh yeah, yeah, drugs were involved. In fact, we were smoking PCP. Here let me go and get it for you. Ran back into the house, had a gram of dust, gave it to him, handed it to him. And he was asking me, are you a dealer or do you sell? I said no, no, no. Hey now, we just buy it for our own personal use. So he says, OK this one is on me. He took the dust and left. Well he asked me if I wanted to be a narc or an informer or all that bullshit.

Whether this informer sense of narc was influenced by the older, British sense of nark meaning an informant is unknown. On the one hand, the clipping of narcotics to narco to narc is both documented and a completely ordinary pattern of morphological development. On the other hand, nark meaning an informer was already present in criminal slang. And it may be that North American use of narc and narco is utterly unrelated to the older term, where use in Britain is influenced by it. But to what degree the older term influenced the newer one is unknown and likely never to be determined.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anglicus, Ducange. The Vulgar Tongue. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1859, 23. Google Books.

Berthelson, Andreas. An English and Danish Dictionary. London: John Haberkorn, 1754. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Blake, James. “Letter” (12 January 1954). The Joint. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971, 59. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Ciardi, John. “Epitaph for the Dead Beats.” Saturday Review, 6 February 1960, 11. The Unz Review.

Feldman, Harvey W., Michael H. Agar, and George M. Beschner, eds. Angel Dust: An Ethnographic Study of PCP Users. Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1979, 146. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. narc, n., narc, v., nark, n.1, nark, v.1, narco, n.

Hotten, John Camden. A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. London: 1860, 179. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Leary, Timothy. The Politics of Ecstasy (1965). New York: G.P. Putnam, 1968, 283. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, vol 1 of 3. London: G. Newbold, 1851, 351. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. narc, n., nark, n.; June 2019, s.v. nark, v.; June 2018, s.v. narco, n.; March 2021, nose, n.; second edition, 1989, snudge, n.

“Padding Kens.” Swell’s Night Guide. London: H. Smith, 1849, 68. London Low Life, Adam Matthew.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts. Rough Proof—Unpublished. London: Constable, 1914, 5–6.

Tidyman, Ernest. Shaft (1970). Mt. Laurel, New Jersey: Dynamite Entertainment, 2016, 55. Kindle.

Vaux, James Hardy. “A Vocabulary of the Flash Language.” Memoirs, vol. 2 of 2. London: W. Clowes, 1819, 192. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Paramount Pictures, 2002. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted image to illustrate a point under discussion.

fritz, on the / on the blink

26 May 2021

When something is on the fritz or on the blink it is out of order or otherwise in unsatisfactory condition. The two phrases are Americanisms and start appearing around the turn of the twentieth century, but otherwise the origins of both are obscure.

The two leading hypotheses for the origins are, first, that on the fritz comes from the German pet name Fritz, short for Friedrich. Specifically, the cartoon characters the Katzenjammer Kids, Hans and Fritz, are often put forward as inspiration for the phrase. But there is no evidentiary trail linking the phrase with anyone named Fritz or even anyone of German extraction in general. Plus, there is no clear motivation for associating that name with some kind of mechanical failure. The second is that fritz is echoic of the sound a machine makes while failing, or that blink represents the light going out in a device. While this second explanation sounds plausible, there is, again, no evidentiary trail. None of the early uses are found in engineering circles or refer to mechanical failures.

What we do know is that on the blink is recorded before on the fritz, although the dates are close enough that we can’t tell which came first in oral use. On the blink appeared in an 1898 story by Paul Gardiner in a passage about traveling through Kentucky:

I began to think that my train had crossed the border into some unfrequented and uninhabited country. In the places at which we stopped, nothing was to be seen in the way of busy streets and well kept lawns and fences, but on the contrary, to use a slang expression, things were “on the blink.”

Railroad stations were uninviting. The name of the stop on the signboard could scarcely be read. Men stood about in slouched felt hats, their dirty jean trousers tucked into their boot tops, beards un-kempt, round, stoop shouldered, their hands pushed down into their pockets.

George V. Hobart, writing under the pseudonym Hugh McHugh, used on the blink in his 1901 book John Henry:

He'll forget it, and day after to-morrow he'll flash the intelligence on me that he has invented a strangle-hold line of business that will put Looey Harrison on the blink.

And Robert Chambers used it in his 1918 The Restless Sex. The person named Steve in this passage is a woman:

For the background of familiar things framed her so naturally and so convincingly and seemed so obviously devised for her in this mellow old household, where everything had its particular place in an orderly ensemble, that when she actually departed for college, the routine became dislocated, jarring everything above and below stairs, and leaving two dismayed and extremely restless men.

“Steve's going off like this has put the whole house on the blink,” protested Jim, intensely surprised to discover the fact.

The earliest recorded instances of on the fritz are found in New York prison slang, although what significance this may have, if any, is uncertain. They are all found in the Star of Hope, a prison newspaper that started at Ossining (Sing Sing) prison, but which quickly expanded to include articles and literary items from prisoners in other New York penitentiaries. The earliest is from the 25 August 1900 issue of the paper:

Now you tell me “to lend you my ears.” Now all dis kind of talk is on de fritz, see? And if you want me to rap to you, you've got to talk plain English, Sing Sing English. See?

And a few months later, on 28 October 1900, a prisoner in the Auburn, New York prison contributed this on the subject of marriage:

I sez to him, sez I, “Chack, if youse take de wall-eyed push collectively an’ not indoowiduals youse’ll fin’ dat marridge is not a failure, perwiding de game’s played on de level, wid no table or sleeve hold-outs. It’s dese yer hold-outs wot queers de game an’ puts de marridge institootin on de fritz.”

That’s what we know about the two phrases. Without further evidence, anything more is speculative. Sometimes “origin unknown” is the correct, if unsatisfying, answer.

But before I leave it, I should mention that researcher Stephen Goranson connects on the fritz with uses of friz, a dialectal spelling of freeze or froze. But I find his hypothesis unconvincing.

It is true that friz is commonly found in late nineteenth-century writing as a dialectal spelling of freeze. Goranson makes the connection with on the fritz through two citations. The first is in a story, “‘Jimmy the Bunco's’ Thanksgiving Dinner,” that appears in the New York Herald on 20 November 1892:

“Lemon water ice?” reiterated the “Bunco,” with a mystified air; “made o’ lemons and water?”

“I dunno’ as I cares on the friz,” murmured the “Bunco” thoughtfully. The word bore too close a resemblance to his general state of being.

The “general state of being” of on the friz could be a precursor to the more specific defective state of on the fritz. But it seems to me that friz here refers to carbonation, and “I dunno’ as I cares on the friz” means that Bunco doesn’t like fizzy drinks. The slang frizzle, meaning champagne, is attested from the middle of the nineteenth century.

The connection to freezing is made through the poem “Suppose” by prisoner Auburn 23,669 published in the November 1902 issue of Star of Hope:

What would the little acorn do
If it had no place to grow?
Would Santa Claus be on the "fritz"
If we never had any snow?

There is a context of winter and snow, but by 1902 the phrase was well established in Auburn prison slang, and this appears to be just another use of on the fritz, with any connection to temperature being coincidental.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Chambers, Robert W. The Restless Sex. New York: A.L. Burt, 1918, 104. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gardiner, A. Paul. “I Kicked Your Dog.” A Drummer’s Parlor Stories. New York: A.P. Gardiner, 1898, 86. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Goranson, Stephen. “‘On the Fritz’ at Sing Sing.” Language Log, 18 March 2018.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. fritz, n.2., blink, n.1., frizzle, n.

“The Hard Man: Makes a Few Observations on the Subject of Marriage.” Cincinnati Enquirer (Ohio), 28 October 1900, 26. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Hotten, John Camden. The Slang Dictionary. London: Hotten, 1864, 138. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“‘Jimmy the Bunco's’ Thanksgiving Dinner.” New York Herald, 20 November 1892, 13. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

McHugh, Hugh (pseudonym of George V. Hobart). John Henry. New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1901, 80–81. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2019, s.v. fritz, n.2; second edition, 1989, s.v. blink, n.2.