Yukon

A 1904 map of the Yukon Territory

11 June 2021

Yukon is an arctic territory of Canada, adjacent to Alaska. Geographically, it is the smallest of Canada’s three territories, and it has roughly the same population as Nunavut and slightly less than the Northwest Territories, making these the smallest of Canada’s provinces and territories in number of people. 

The name Yukon was first applied to the Yukon River, and later extended to the region through which the river flows. The name is from Athabascan language family, specifically from the Gwich’in phrase Ųųg Han or Yuk Han. The meaning of the phrase is variously given as white water river or great river. The name was first rendered in English as Youcan, and later shortened to Yukon. Of course, other Indigenous groups have their own names for the river.

The first white man to stand on the banks of the river was John Bell, a fur trader and explorer for the Hudson Bay Company. Bell wrote an August 1845 letter to his superior at the Hudson Bay Company, George Simpson, who governed the region on behalf of the British government, in which he said:

I have great pleasure in informing you that I have at length after much trouble and difficulties succeeded in reaching the “Youcon,” or White Water River, so named by the natives from the pale colour of its water.

Another early English-language reference to the river is found in John Shillinglaw’s 1850 A Narrative of Arctic Discovery, in an account of John Rae’s 1849 expedition to find the whereabouts of John Franklin’s expedition, which had been lost the previous year:

Simultaneously with the expedition to proceed towards Cape Walker, one or two small parties were to be despatched to the westward of the Mackenzie, in the direction of Point Barrow, one of which was to cross over to the Youcon River, and descending that stream to the sea, carry on their explorations in that quarter, while the other going down the Mackenzie was to trace the coast thence towards the Youcon. And these parties were also to be instructed to offer rewards to the natives to prosecute the search in all directions.

Yukon was originally part of the Northwest Territories but was separated from that territory in 1898.

Traditionally the name of the territory has been fashioned as the Yukon, but the definite article was officially dropped from the territory’s name in 2003, although Yukoners and outsiders alike, still often refer to it as the Yukon.

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Sources:

Coates, Ken S. and William R. Morrison. Land of the Midnight Sun: A History of the Yukon. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988, 2, 21. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.

Robinson, Aimée Dawn. “The Controversial Three Letter Word.” Whats Up Yukon, 23 May 2013.

Shillinglaw, John J. A Narrative of Arctic Discovery. London: William Shoberl, 1850, 332. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Marsh & Grant Co., 1904. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

New York minute

The Grand Central Station terminal clock in New York City. A round, four-faced clock adorning the top of an information kiosk in the main hall of the terminal.

10 June 2021

Late-night talk-show host Johnny Carson allegedly once defined a New York minute as the time between a traffic light turning green and the driver of the car behind you honking their horn. More precisely and less humorously, it is a very brief interval of time, an instant. The phrase would seem to come from the fast pace of life in New York City, although there is an anomalous early citation that casts some doubt on this being the origin.

Unsurprisingly, the phrase New York minute doesn’t have its origin in New York city itself. It is clearly a term coined by those who don’t live in the city to describe what they think living there is like. The earliest unambiguous use of the phrase that I have found is a description of horse-drawn traffic in Leavenworth, Kansas, hardly a bustling metropolis. From the Leavenworth Bulletin of 12 July 1870:

Fast driving is rampant in this city. No effort is made to prevent it. Drivers and pleasure seekers try to fly from one end of town to the other in about a New York minute. When dusk and night approach, it becomes still more lovely. Mark this: A circumstance will occur on one of our streets ere long, if the game continues.

If the speed of horses and buggies awed this correspondent, imagine what they would make of traffic in the Big Apple today. Everything is relative, I guess.

Another early citation comes a month later from Titusville, Pennsylvania. The 13 August 1870 issue of the Titusville Herald carried this story of a man who found a mountain lion under his bed:

Hastily rising, he jerked on his unmentionables and, dropping on all fours, began to claw beneath the bed after the midnight intruder. He found it, and in one-fourth of a New York minute all the clothes there were upon him would not have made a bib for a China doll. He finally found himself in the corner partly scalped, with his lower limbs looking as though he had been through a wool carding machine; while at this juncture, with a spit and a growl, a catamount disappeared through the open window.

That would seem to be it. A rather straightforward origin, except...

There is this use of York minute from forty years earlier. It appears in a 13 July 1830 journal entry of Joseph Pickering, an Englishman traveling through the Great Lakes region, between Canada and the United States. He uses the phrase in a description of an inn in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, and from the context it is clear he is referencing York, Ontario (a.k.a. what is now Toronto), not New York City:

By the time they have all taken a “drink” or two a-piece, and swallowed a mouthful of water after it, you will hear “guessing” and “calculating” enough, undoubtedly, and something better, “I don’t think!” Be careful they do not tread on your toes at this time, and if you wish to retain a seat, do not get up from it even for a “York minute.”

There are several possibilities here. One is that the two phrases were coined independently, referring to the nearest or most famous big city—although back then York/Toronto was hardly a even a city—less than 3,000 people compared to over 180,000 in New York of the era. Or, it could be that New York minute was already in circulation in 1830, and Pickering was playing with the existing phrase. It is not unheard of for slang phrases to go unrecorded for decades, so this explanation isn’t out of the question. A third possibility is that the phrase did in fact originally refer to York/Toronto, and as it gained a purchase in the United States, Americans appropriated it for their own, and York transformed into New York.

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Sources:

“Couldn’t Stand the Cats.” Titusville Herald (Pennsylvania), 13 August 1870, 3. NewspaperArchive.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. New York, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. New York, n.

Pickering, Joseph. Journal entry, 13 July 1830. Emigration or No Emigration. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830. 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Safire, William. “In a New York Minute.” New York Times Magazine, 19 October 1986, 12.

“A Wandering Wife’s Return.” Leavenworth Bulletin (Kansas), 12 July 1870, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Tony Hisgett, 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

new / news

9 June 2021

The words new and news have a very straightforward (and, frankly, boring) etymology. Normally, I wouldn’t bother with a word like this, but news has a long-standing false acronymic etymology that needs to be addressed.

The adjective new, characterizing something as not previously existing, traces back to the Old English neow. We can, for instance, see it in the Vespasian Psalter, a late eighth century Latin version of the book of Psalms with an early ninth century, interlinear Old English translation. The translation is in the Mercian dialect. From Psalm 32(33):3:

Detail of the Vespasian Psalter, folio 35r containing the portion of Psalm 32(33) that contains the word neowne (new) in an interlinear gloss over the Latin text

Cantate ei canticum nouum bene psallite in iubilatione

singað him song neowne wel singað in wynsumnisse

(sing him a new song, sing well in joyfulness)

The Old English adjective was also used as a substantive, eliding the noun it modified. We still see this usage today, as in the new and the old.

But use as a plural noun, news, meaning new things or novelties appears in the late fourteenth century, after the French nouvelles and/or the Latin novae, From a Wycliffite Bible, Ecclesiasticus 24:34–36, written sometime before 1382:

he sette to dauyd his child to reren vp a king of hym most strong: & in þe trone of worshipe sittinge in to euermore þe which fullfilleþ as phison wisdam: & as tigris in þe daiys of newis þat fulfilleþ as eufrates wit: þat multeplieþ as Jordan in þe tyme of rip

(He set David, his servant, to raise up a king of him most strong, and in the throne of worship sitting for evermore who fills wisdom as the Pishon, and as the Tigris in the days of news, who fills the Euphrates with that which produces as Jordan in the time of harvest.)

The Vulgate Latin uses novorum (of new [things]) in this passage.

And by the early fifteenth century, news was being used to mean tidings or reports. In these early uses it took plural agreement. From a 1417 letter to King Henry V:

RIGHTE excellente, righte gracious, and our righte redoubt and righte soveraiyne leige Lord, Wee doe recomend us unto your high royall Ma[jes]tie. soe humbly and obediently as any leige men may doe, in any manner, unto there soveraigne and redoubted leige Lord; especiallie, and above all other earthly thinges desiringe to heare and to knowe of the gracious prosperitie and noble health of your renowned person; the same beinge soe gracious and joyous newes as any can imagine or thinke to the principall comforte and especiall consolation of us and all your faythfull subjectes.

Now we come to the only interesting thing about the history of the word news. By the mid sixteenth century, it started taking singular agreement. A collection of tidings began to be treated as a singular entity. From a 1566 translation of Celio Secondo Curione’s Pasquine in a Traunce:

Thou sayest truth, for I hearde speak of it, whe[n] ye newes therof was brought to Pope Iulie the seconde, albeit this be also written in a faithfull story, and yet escaped they not vnpunished therefore, for foure of the[m] which were priuy to this, and other so great sacrileges were burnt aliue.

Hence, today we say the news is bad, not the news are bad.

That’s it. A pretty unremarkable history. But somewhere along the way, someone started spreading the idea that news was an acronym for north, south, east, and west, from the idea that tidings came from all directions. This is utter rot. Remember, anytime you hear someone suggest that word has an acronymic origin, treat the claim with suspicion. Very few words are newly coined via acronym (as opposed to coining a phrase that forms an acronym of an existing word; that is quite common).

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Sources:

Curione, Celio Secondo. Pasquine in a Traunce: A Christian and Learned Dialogue. W.P., trans. London: William Seres, 1566, 36v.

Ellis, Henry, ed. “Letter 19. Letter to Kinge Henry Vth in Behalf of the Lord Furnyval Lord Lieutenant of Ireland” (1417). Original Letters, Illustrative of English History, second series, vol. 1 of 4. London: Harding and Lepard, 1827, 54–55. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 418, fol. 85.

Kuhn, Sherman M., ed. The Vespasian Psalter. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 28. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A.1

Lindberg, Conrad, ed. MS. Bodley 959: Genesis–Baruch 3.20 in the Earlier Version of the Wycliffite Bible, vol. 4 of 8. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1965, 337. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 959.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. new, adj. and n.; December 2020, s.v. news, n.

Image credit: London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A.1, fol. 35r. Public domain as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1925.

nerd

1952 cartoon of a bald, middle-aged man broadcasting a radio commercial, saying, “You’ll get a large charge from Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes. So get on the stick with these real fat, real cool, really crazy clothes. Don’t be a Party-Pooper or a nerd. Yes, everybody is bashing ears about Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes....”

8 June 2021

A nerd is a socially inept, often highly intelligent—particularly within a narrow technical field—and otherwise thoroughly conventional person. The slang term makes its appearance in the United States during the early 1950s, but its origin is otherwise mysterious. We simply don’t know where it comes from.

The earliest known use in print is from an article on teen slang in the weekly (physical/paper) news magazine Newsweek from 8 October 1951:

Nerds and Scurves: In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd, or in a less severe case, a scurve.

The next known appearance is a few days later in a Melbourne, Australia newspaper. But this appearance is again in an article about U.S. teen slang, and the Australian article appears to be heavily cribbed from the Newsweek piece. So, this appearance doesn’t add anything new and doesn’t represent the word having made it Down Under:

“Corny,” “solid,” and “in the groove” are out today. That is they’re “real nothing.”

Teenagers in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Los Angeles who resort to such passe expressions are mere peasants or “nerds.”

Another early appearance is in a cartoon in Collier’s magazine from 2 February 1952. In the cartoon by John Norment, a radio announcer uses nerd in advertising copy for teen clothing:

You’ll get a large charge from Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes. So get on the stick with these real fat, real cool, really crazy clothes. Don’t be a Party-Pooper or a nerd. Yes, everybody is bashing ears about Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes. They’re Frampton. They’re pash-pie. They’re Most! [...] The geetafrate is reasonable and we’ll make it Chili for you. Remember, don’t be an odd ball. The name is Hoffman’s Teen-Age Clothes.

We don’t know where nerd comes from, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t hypotheses and speculations about its origin. One of the more plausible, but still probably wrong, ones is that nerd appears as a nonsense name for a strange creature in the 1950 children’s book If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel). The idea is that this nonsense word wormed its way into teen-age consciousness and was assigned its present meaning there. The passage from the book reads:

The page from Dr. Seuss’s 1950 children’s book If I Ran the Zoo, that contains the word nerd, as well as a drawing of a Seussian nerd and of other fanciful creatures

And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo / And / Bring / Back / an IT-KUTCH / a PREEP / and a PROO / a NERKLE / a NERD / and a SEERSUCKER, too!

But this hypothesis is questionable at best. Seuss’s nerd has no semantic connection to the slang term. And given that the first print use is in the thoroughly conventional Newsweek a year later, it is likely that nerd had already been in oral use by teens for several years when Seuss published this book. It is more likely that Seuss picked a word that he had heard in use and unconsciously registered it rather than that teens acquired it from his book—a book that most teens in 1950 hadn’t read as it was intended for much younger children. And even more likely is that Seuss’s use of nerd is entirely coincidental.

Another hypothesis is that nerd is a variation on the name Mortimer Snerd, one of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s puppets. But Snerd was a hillbilly character of low intelligence, so the character doesn’t fit with the early senses of nerd.

Other proffered explanations run afoul of the spelling. It is often suggested that nerd is a play on turd. This is plausible, but the early spellings are overwhelmingly with an <e>, which works against this idea. Similarly, some contend that nerd is a respelling of drunk backwards. Again, there are no early spellings of the word as knurd, nor are any of the early uses associated with alcohol.

The earlier slang exclamation nertz! or nerts! is sometimes pointed to as a possible origin, but again, there is no logical or semantic connection.

One explanation that we can dismiss outright is that nerd is an acronym for Northern Electric Research and Development Laboratories in Ontario. There is a logical connection in that one would expect a lab to be full of nerds, but one should always be suspicious of proposed acronymic origins, and in this case Northern Electric (now Nortel) didn’t establish their R&D labs until 1959, well after nerd was firmly ensconced in the slang lexicon.

The best explanation for nerd that I have heard comes from linguist Arnold Zwicky, as quoted by Ben Zimmer. Zwicky says that words like nerd “don't necessarily have a historical source of the ordinary sort.” They can be “distant echoes of an assortment of existing words.” In other words, a bit of nertz, a dash of Snerd, a whiff of turd, and you end up with nerd.

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Sources:

Geisel, Theodore (Dr. Seuss). If I Ran the Zoo. New York: Random House, 1950.

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

“Jelly Tot, Square Bear-Man!” Newsweek, 38.15, 8 October 1951, 28. ProQuest Magazines.

Norment, John, Cartoon. Collier’s Weekly, 2 February 1952. The Unz Review.

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

“U.S. Teen-Agers Talk a ‘Cool, Shafty’ Language. The Age (Melbourne, Australia), 11 October 1951, 4. Google News.

Zimmer, Ben. “Birth of the Nerd: The Word; the Mysterious Origins of a Familiar Character.” Boston Globe, 28 August 2011, K2. ProQuest Newspapers.

Image credits: John Norment, Collier’s Weekly, 2 February 1952, 39. Theodore Geisel, 1950, If I Rand the Zoo. Fair use of a copyrighted images to illustrate the topic under discussion.

neck of the woods

Sign posted at the entrance to Maine’s Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park. A wooden sign giving the park’s name in the foreground with trees in the background.

7 June 2021

The word neck, like the common name of many body parts, can be traced back to Old English, that is the language as it was spoken prior to the Norman Conquest. In this case, the Old English word is hnecca. Here is the word as it is used in the Old English translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. The Old English text dates to the late tenth century:

Be ðæm wæs suiðe wel gecueden ðurh ðone witgan: Wa ðæm ðe willað under ælcne elnbogan lecggean pyle & bolster under ælcne hneccan menn mid to gefonne. Se legeð pyle under ælces monnes elnbogan, se ðe mid to gefonne. Se legeð pyle under ælces monnes elnbogan, se ðe mid liðum oliccungum wile læcnian ða men ðe sigað on ðisses middangeardes lufan, oððæt hie afeallað of hiera ryhtwisnessum.

(Of that was very well spoken through the prophet: “Woe to those who wish to lay a pillow under every person’s elbow and a bolster under each neck to ensnare people with.” He lays a pillow under every person’s elbow who with soft flatteries wishes to heal who sink into love of this world, until they fall from their righteousness.)

Gregory’s original Latin reads sub capite (below the head).

In the fourteenth century, neck began to be used metaphorically for things that are narrow or tapering, especially a narrow passage or channel. Here is a passage from John Trevisa’s late fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) that uses neck in reference to a bottle:

Fiola haþ þe name of glas, for glas hatte fila in gru and is a litel vessel wiþ a brood botme and a smal nekke.

(Fiola has the name glass, for a glass is fila in Greek and is a little vessel with a broad bottom and small neck.)

Another example is neck being used to refer the narrow part of a stringed instrument, like a violin. From Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary:

Manche: m. The haft, belue, or handle of a toole; also, the necke of a musicall Instrument; also, a mans toole.

Note the French word is also slang for a different body part.

By the eighteenth century, neck started to be used for narrow bits of terrain. Here is an August 1707 article from the London Gazette describing the fighting during the War of the Spanish Succession that used neck to refer to a mountain pass:

Their Cannon did great Execution; and Fort Louis was so shatter’d, that it could not hold out four Days longer. Those Letters add, That Monsieur Medavi, with what Troops he could get together, was to advance towards the Neck of the Mountains at Cuers; and that Prince Eugene had march’d from the Camp with a Detachment of 3000 Horse and 2000 Grenadiers upon some important Design.

Daniel Defoe used neck to refer to a strait or narrow body of water in his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe:

When I came down from my Apartment in the Tree, I look’d about me again, and the first thing I found was the Boat, which lay as the Wind and the Sea had toss’d her up upon the Land, about two Miles on my right Hand, I walk’d as far as I could upon the Shore to have got to her, but found a Neck or Inlet of Water between me and the Boat, which was about half a Mile broad, so I came back for the present, being more intent upon getting at the Ship, where I hop’d to find something for my present Subsistence.

And we get neck of wood, referring to a narrow strip of forest, in Arthur Young’s 1780 A Tour of Ireland. Here he described the grounds of Castle Caldwell, in County Fermanagh in what is now Northern Ireland:

This wood is perfectly a deep shade, and has an admirable effect. At the other end it joins another woody promontory, in which the lawn opens beautifully among the scattered trees, and just admits a partial view of the house half obscured; carrying your eye a little more to the left, you see three other necks of wood, which stretch into the lake, generally giving a deep shade, but here and there admitting the water behind the stems and through the branches of the trees; all of this bounded by cultivated hills, and those backed by distant mountains.

And in nineteenth-century America, we see the phrase neck of the woods expand metaphorically again, referring to a neighborhood, area, or region. From the horseracing paper the Spirit of the Times of 15 June 1839, where a correspondent uses neck of the woods in this way, claiming that it is a phrase common in Indiana (i.e., the Hoosier State):

Many of your valuable hints to race course proprietors have been practised upon by Col. Oliver, and he seems to have imbibed a goodly portion of your “Spirit,” besides bringing into requisition the genuine essence of his own. He is emphatically, as they say in Arkansas, (I ask Pete’s pardon,) the “supreme alligator” of everything that savors the advance. If yourself and Oliver don’t make folks open their eyes in this neck of woods (as we say in the Hooshier State), it will be because they have none to open.

That’s how a thousand-year-old word for a body part came to refer to one’s neighborhood.

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Sources:

Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London: Adam Islip, 1611, s.v. Manche. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. London: W. Taylor, 1719, 46. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. hnecca.

London Gazette, 18–21 August 1707, 1. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Louisville (Ky.) Spring Races” (6 June 1839). The Spirit of the Times, 15 June 1839, 175. American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 3.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. neck, n.1.

Sweet, Henry, ed. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care. Early English Text Society 45. London: N. Trübner, 1871, 143. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20.

Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things, vol. 2 of 3. M.C. Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, Book 19, 1376. London, British Library, MS Additional 27944.

Young, Arthur. A Tour in Ireland, vol. 1 of 2. Dublin: George Bonham, 1780, 266. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo credit: Daveynin, 2015. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.