catawampus

14 June 2021

Catawampus is a protean, nonsense word. It has no specific meaning, changing to fit the circumstances. Over the years it has meant askew, total or totally, excessive or excessively, ill-tempered, a fanciful creature, and so on. Similarly, it has been used as an adjective, noun, verb, adverb, exclamation, and proper name. Its one unwavering feature is that is used in jocular or non-serious contexts. It appears in the United States by 1830 and rather quickly spreads to the rest of the English-speaking world.

The earliest use that I have found is as an adverb meaning askew or obliquely. In this sense it may have been influenced by catercorner. It appears in the 12 June 1830 Carolina Sentinel in a mention of a slang/dialect dictionary:

     New Dictionary.—The Augusta Courier gives a specimen of the Cracker Dictionary, an unpublished work; the following are some of the definitions:
     Bodiaciously—means corporeously.—Catawampusly, obliquely, bias.

(I’ve been unable to locate the relevant issue of the Augusta Courier or a copy of the Cracker Dictionary—if it was ever published.)

Its use as an adjective meaning askew or warped can be seen in this humor piece in the September 1852 issue of the North Carolina University Magazine:

Consequently the circle or circular figure is the most beautiful shape in nature. Young gentlemen seem to be aware of this, and by means of a material called hair they contrive to manufacture faces of all forms, from a perfect circle to a catawampus ellipse. If they want an elliptical face, they create a patch of hairs on the chin. This lengthens the transverse axis, and, as all mathematicians know, causes the face to depart from the circular form and assume the elliptical one required. If they want a circular face, they lay two equal batches of hair on, beneath each ear, this increases the conjugate axis, and causes the ellipses to approximate to the circle—thus are circular and elliptical faces constructed.

Another very early use is as an adverb meaning totally, completely. From the 11 June 1834 Gloucester Telegraph (Massachusetts):

Fates of Deserters.—Charles Green, boatswain’s mate, a deserter from the U. S. ship St. Louis, and James Medlar, a deserter from the U. S. ship Delaware, received their rations in the gangway of the U. S. Flag ship Hudson, on Friday last, at the navy yard in Brooklyn: when they were politely handed into a boat, and drummed ashore stern foremost! This is what we should term, “tee-to-tolly ramquaddled, and catawampously chawed up.” The poor fellows looked like motherless colts.—N. Y. Sun.

Catawampusly chawed up was an idiom, appearing in many other sources, such as the Weekly Ohio State Journal of 26 April 1843:

From the New York Aurora of Thursday.
“The Election.—Final Result.—The ascertained result of the election, on Tuesday, is even more glorious than we stated yesterday. Never was a poor set of devils so tetotaciously and catawampously chawed up and exflunctificated as the Whigs. Their writhings yesterday were dreadful to behold,” and so on.

And in another dozen years, catawampously chawed up had reached India, as seen in the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce of 8 October 1845:

Our readers will not have forgotten that we lately drew attention to the undignified behaviour of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at Bombay, in the matter of a misunderstanding which existed between the Advocate General and himself, on the subject of some real or supposed official error committed by the former party, with reference to certain criminal cases set down for trial before the Court. They will remember also that his Lordship at the same time threatened to invoke the displeasure of the local Government against their delinquent Law Advisor, and that the learned gentleman might in short consider himself a highly favored individual, if he was not “catawampously chawed up” and made a caution to all future advocates in something less than no time.

It could also be an adjective meaning excessive. From an article about the California Gold Rush in the Newark Daily Advertiser of 2 February 1849 (and reprinted in many papers on both sides of the Atlantic):

Toted my tools to Hiram K. Doughboy’s boarding shanty and settled with him for blankets and board, at 30 dollars per diem. Catawampus prices here, that’s a fact; but every body’s got more dust than he knows what to do with.

Nineteenth-century newspaper editors loved to engage in wordplay, and catawampus was even used as an epithet for the Roman god Jupiter in the Charleston Mercury of 29 July 1844:

The thunderbolt has burst—Jupiter Catawampus has taken the matter in hand—Malvolio is honest, and there shall be no more cakes and ale!!! Let the earth tremble—let the State Rights party hang its head and body too—let Free Trade go a wool-gathering—let South Carolina, as Henry the Eighth said to the Lady Abbess, “go spin, hussy!” It is really all over with us, and what adds to the calamity is the appalling suddenness of its catastrophe. The editor of the Courier has come out for the Union and the Tariff, and is favorable to consolidation generally? and he doesn’t care who knows it.

It could be an adjective meaning ill-tempered, as seen here in Robert Carlton’s 1843 tale of the American frontier, The New Purchase:

The tother one what got most sker’d, is a sort of catawampus (spiteful) and maybe underhand wouldn’t stick to do you a mischief if he thought you made a laff on him—albeit, he’s been laffed at a powerful heap afore.

Catawampus could also be a disease, something of a dreadful lurgy. In this case, it refers to seasickness, from the New Orleans Weekly Delta of 21 September 1846:

Night came on, and I—“Young Maryland,” as I was styled—just as I was engaged in the humane task of pouring a brandy toddy down the throat of “Old Kentuck,” was taken with an awful fit of the catawampus. Oh, Delta—beloved Delta, were you ever sea-sick? Think of it, and weep—yea, shed about fourteen gallons of tears. The vessel, like some Titan’s cradle, rocking at the rate of two miles per minute—the sea in an “orful skuirl”—twenty-seven unhappy wretches extended on the wet cabin floor, and each of them attended by a large——wash basin!

And catawampus could mean some mysterious or fearsome creature. This sense may have been influenced by catamount, another name for the North American mountain lion. From Bill Arp’s fictitious 1866 memoir of his time in the Confederate congress:

My opinion is, that some other Bill might have been found that would have done better or worse. One might have been discovered on the coast of Africa, or in the Lake of Good Hope, or somewhere in the Mediterranean Mountains, but Congress was, I suppose, afraid to run the blockade after it. If they had applied to your distinguished and humble fellow-citizen, I would have undertaken the job. But, alas! they didn't. On the contrary, they barred the doors, and shut the window blinds, and let down the curtains, and stopped up the keyholes, and went into a place called SECRET SESSION, which is perhaps a little the closest communion ever established in a well-watered country. A grand jury or a Masonic Lodge, or a Know-Nothing convention, isn't a circumstance to it. It is a thing that plots, and plans, and schemes for a few weeks, and then suddenly pokes its head out like a catawampus and says, Booh! Then all the pop-eyed folks run about and say, Booh! Booh!! And the peaceable, anti-bullet citizens begin to tremble in the knees, and say, Booh! Booh!! Booh!!! And it keeps travelling faster and faster, and growing bigger and bigger, until it reaches the Governor, and he is constrained to get on a fodder-stack pole and say in a loud voice, Booh! Booh!! Booh!!! Booh!!!! B-o-o-o-o-o-o-h!!!!!

With no fixed origin or literal meaning, catawampus can, and has been used, to mean a wide variety of things. It means whatever the context demands it mean.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Arp, Bill (pseudonym of Charles Henry Smith). Bill Arp, So Called. A Side Show of the Southern Side of the War. New York: Metropolitan Record Office, 1866. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“The Bombay Supreme Court Quarrel.” Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, 8 October 1845, 662. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Times of India.

Carlton, Robert (pseudonym of Baynard Rush Hall). The New Purchase: Or, Seven and a Half Years in the Far West, vol. 1 of 2. New York: D. Appleton, 1843, 265. .

“Charleston.” Charleston Mercury (South Carolina), 29 July 1844, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. catawampus, n., catawampus, adj., catawampus, adv., catawampus, v.

“Fates of Deserters.” Gloucester Telegraph (Massachusetts), 11 June 1834, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“A Few Days in the Diggings.” Newark Daily Advertiser (New Jersey), 2 February 1849, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v., catawampus, n., catawampus, adj., catawampus, v., catawampus!, excl., and catawampusly, adv.

“Odds and Ends.” Carolina Sentinel (Newbern, South Carolina), 12 June 1830, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. catawampous, adj.

“The Policy of the Administration and Its Men.” Weekly Ohio State Journal (Columbus), 26 April 1843, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Sketches of Travel.—No. 1.” New Orleans Weekly Delta, 21 September 1846, 8. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Something About Beauty and Ugliness.” North Carolina University Magazine, 1.7, September 1852, 283–84. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.

Discuss this post

---

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).

Discuss this post

---

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.