nightmare

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781. A painting of a woman, clothed in white bedclothes, lying prostrate on a bed while a gnome-like demon sits on her chest; the head of black horse pokes through the bed curtains to observe.

17 June 2021

If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, or perused its Monster Manual, you may have encountered the description of a nightmare. The Forgotten Realms Wiki, which is about the role-playing game, describes nightmares thusly:

Nightmares were seemingly emaciated stallions, approximately 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall at the shoulders, with night-black coats. On further examination, however, their warhorse-like exterior was revealed to be entirely superficial. They had huge heads, fangs like vipers, and malevolent dark eyes often illuminated by red-hot flames, and they spouted orange fire when their nostrils flared. Wreathed in fire, their manes were wild and their tails unkempt, but they turned to cinders and quickly dispersed upon death.

It’s understandable that a speaker of Present-Day English would think a nightmare was some kind of demonic horse, but outside of D&D that’s not the case.

Of course, in Present-Day English a nightmare is a scary dream. The word dates back to Old English and is a compound of niht (night) + mære (demon, evil spirit), in other words an incubus or succubus. These demons supposedly visit humans in the night and have sexual relations with them, causing erotic dreams, inspiring lustful thoughts, and doing worse things. Incubi are male demons, succubi female. Mære (demon) is not to be confused with mearh (horse), which gives us the present-day mare, a female horse. (And since I’ve brought D&D into the discussion, I might as well mention that readers of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings have probably recognized that this latter word was the inspiration for the mearas, the bloodline of horses in the novel that produced Gandalf’s horse Shadowfax.)

We see mære (demon) in the late seventh-century Épinal Glossary, a Latin-Old English lexicon:

incuba     mera uel satyrus

And we see a fuller description in the ninth-century Bald’s Leechbook, a medical text:

Gif mon mare ride genim elehtran & garleac & betonican & recels, bind on næsce, hæbbe him mon on & he gange in on þas wyrte.

(If a mare ride a man, take lupins & garlic & betony & frankincense, bind them in a fawn’s skin, let him have the worts on [him], & let him go on [his way].)

The compound nightmare appeared by the end of the thirteenth century. We see it in the South English Legendary, a collection of hagiographies or saints’ lives. In that collection, the story of St. Michael the Archangel includes a description of demons, including the nightmare:

Portion of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc 108, fol. 134v. containing the text about demons and nightmares

Þe luþere gostes beoth a-boute     with heore luþere pouwer
To bi-traye wrechche men    and bringue into heore paunter;
And þe guode beoth al-so a-boute    with power þat heore is
For-to witien men fram sunne     þat huy ne wurchen amis.
Boþe þe luþere and þe guode    a-liȝteth ofte a-doun
And to men in hore slepe comieth    ase In a visioun
And scheowieth in metingue    mani a wounder dede,
Þe guode of guode þinges    and þe luþere euere of quede,
And deriez men in heore slep     and bodieth seoruwe and care,
And ofte huy ouer-liggez [men]     and men cleopiet þe niȝt-mare.

(The wicked spirits are about with their wicked power to betray wretched men and bring [them[ into their snare; and the good [spirits] are also about with the power that there is to protect men from sin so that they not behave amiss. Both the wicked and the guode [spirits] often alight down and come to men in their sleep as in a vision and show in dreams many a wondrous deed, the good of good things and the wicked always of sinful [things], and injure men in their sleep and bode sorrow and care, and often overlie [men] and men call them nightmares.)

The demonic mære largely fell out of use in the Early Modern period, only persisting in some regional dialects, hence the confusion and semantic substitution of a horse for the demon.

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Sources:

Cockayne, Oswald, ed. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2 of 3. London: Longman, et al, 1865. 140. Google Books.

Horstman, Carl, ed. The Early South-English Legendary. Early English Text Society, OS 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, 306. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc 108, fol. 134v.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. night-mare, n., mare, n.(2).

“Nightmare (Creature).” Forgotten Realms Wiki, 5 April 2021.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. nightmare, n. and adj., mare, n.2.

Pheifer, J.D. Old English Glosses in the Épinal–Erfurt Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 30. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Épinal (Vosges), Bibliothèque Municipale MS 72(2).

Image credits: Henry Fuseli, 1781, The Nightmare, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, public domain image. Anonymous scribe, late thirteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc 108, fol. 134v, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

nightingale

The nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos); a brown songbird sitting on a branch with its mouth open, presumably singing

16 June 2021

The nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) is a migratory songbird common throughout Eurasia that winters in Sub-Saharan Africa. The bird is so called because it also sings at night, not just during the day.

The name can be traced back to the Old English nihtegale, from niht (night) + galan (to sing). The word appears in a number of Latin–Old English glossaries; one of the earliest is the Corpus Glossary from the early eighth century:

Achalantis . uel luscinia uel roscinia nehtęgale

(The < ę > in the manuscript is a Latin character that represents the ligature more commonly written as < æ >.)

The entry for nightingale in the eight-century Corpus Glossary, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 144

The insertion of the / n / in an unstressed, middle syllable of trisyllabic words before a / g /, / dʒ /, or / d / is a typical development in Middle English; we also see it in words like messenger, popinjay, and colander. The insertion eases the transition between the unstressed vowel and the following consonant.

And we can see this transition happening in one of the earlier Middle English appearances of the word, in the late thirteenth-century debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale, in which the two birds argue over which one is the more useful. The poem survives in two manuscripts. The opening of the poem as it appears in British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.9 has the inserted < n >:

The opening lines of the Owl and the Nightingale in London, British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.9, fol. 233r

Ich was in one sumere dale,
In one suþe diȝele hale;
Iherde ich holde grete tale
An hule and one niȝtingale.

(I was in a summer valley, in a very hidden place; I heard an owl and a nightingale holding a great debate.)

While the other manuscript, Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part 2, copied at about the same time, uses the older form and reads nyhtegale.

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Sources:

Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale. U of Exeter Press, 2001, 2.

Hessels, J.H. An Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890 10. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 144, fol. 233r.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. nightin-gale, n., nighte-gale, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. nightingale, n.1, nightgale, n.

Image credits: Bernard Dupont, 2016, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 144: The Corpus Glossary, Stanford University, Parker on the Web, public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1927; British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.9, fol. 233r, public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1927.

Arkansas / Kansas

Map of the Arkansas River basin as the river flows through the states of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas to the Mississippi River

15 June 2021

The river and later the state of Arkansas take their name from Akansa an Algonquian name for the Quapaw, a Dhegiha Siouan-speaking people, who had settled along the banks of what is now the called the Arkansas River. The a- is an Algonquian prefix used in names of ethnic groups, and kką́ze is the Siouan name for the tribe, which the Algonquian languages borrowed. The unpronounced terminal <s> is a French plural. Despite the Siouan root at its heart, it is not a name the Quapaw use or used for themselves.

The name Kansas, as one might expect, comes from the same root, although here the reference is to a different Dhegiha Sioux people, the Kansa, also known as the Kaw. The name Kaw was originally a French abbreviation for Kansa.

Both tribal names appear in English by 1722, when they show up in Daniel Coxe’s A Description of the English Province of Carolana:

Sixteen Leagues further upon the West side, enter the Meschacebe two Rivers, which unite about 10 Leagues above, and make an Island call’d by the Name of the Torimans, by whom it is inhabited.

The Southerly of these two Rivers, is that of the Ousoutiwy upon which dwell first the Akansas, a great Nation, higher upon the same River the Kansæ, Mintou, Erabacha and others.

It’s commonly asserted that the name kką́ze or Kansa means “people of the south wind,” and others assert that the root means “downstream.” But there is no particular reason to think the name originally meant anything like that. The original sense has been lost to the ages.

Arkansas was admitted to the union as the twenty-fifth state on 15 June 1836, and Kansas as the thirty-fourth on 19 January 1861.

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Sources:

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

Coxe, Daniel. A Description of the English Province of Carolana. London: B. Cowse, 1722, 11. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Bailey, Garrick A. and Gloria A. Young. “Kansa.” Handbook of North American Indians: Plains, vol. 13, part 1 of 17 vols. Raymond J. DeMallie, volume ed. William C. Sturtevant, general editor. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001, 474–75. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

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

Young, Gloria A. and Michael P. Hoffman. “Quapaw.” Handbook of North American Indians: Plains, vol. 13, part 1 of 17 vols. Raymond J. DeMallie, volume ed. William C. Sturtevant, general editor. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001, 511–12. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: “Shannon1,” 2019. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. 

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.

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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.

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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.