Hampshire / New Hampshire

21 June 2021

Entry for 860 C.E. in the Peterborough Chronicle that mentions Hamtunescire (Hampshire)

The Europeans who settled New Hampshire were not the first inhabitants of the land. Most of the indigenous people who lived in what is now New Hampshire were speakers of Abenaki, an Algonquian language, and they had their own names for land and places therein. Some of these toponyms survive in a modified form in their English names. For instance, the name of the Merrimack River is from the Abenaki molô (deep) + demak (water). Other indigenous names in the state have been erased and replaced by English ones. For instance, the White Mountains, which dominate the state, have the Abenaki name ôgawakwajoak (shady mountains), and Mount Washington, the highest point on the U.S. eastern seaboard, is known as gôdagwajo (hidden mountain).

New Hampshire is, unsurprisingly, named after the English county of Hampshire. That name, which dates to the ninth century, comes from the Old English Hamtunscir, hamm (estate, home) + tun (enclosure, town) + scir (shire, administrative district. The English name appears in the Peterborough Chronicle for the year 860 C.E.:

AN.dccclx.Her Æðelbald cining forðferde, & his lic lið æt Scireburnan, & feng Æðelbriht to eallum þam rice his broðor. & on his dæge com mycel sciphere up & abræcon Wintanceastre, & wið þone here fuhton Osrice aldorman mid Hamtunescire & Æðelwulf ealdorman mid Barrucscire, & þone here geflymdon & wælstowe geweald ahton. & se Æðelbriht rixade .v. gear, & his lic liðæt Scirburnan.

(Year 860. In this year King Æðelbald died & his body lies at Sherborne & and Æðelbriht received all that kingdom of his brother & in his day a great fleet came up and razed Winchester & against that army fought Alderman Osric with [the men of] Hampshire & Alderman Æðelwulf with [the men of] Berkshire, and put that army to flight and held sway over the battlefield & Æðelbriht ruled for five years and his body lies at Sherborne.)

John Mason, the first proprietor of the English colony and later U.S. state, gave it the name New Hampshire, after the English county. On 7 November 1629, Mason was granted a patent for the land that constitutes what is now southern New Hampshire by the joint-stock company the Council for New England:

Now this Indenture witnesseth that the said President and Council, of their free and mutual consent, as well to the end, that all their lands, woods, lakes, rivers, waters, islands and fishings, with all the traffic, profits and commodities whatsoever, to them or any of them belonging, and hereafter in these presents mentioned, may be wholly and entirely invested, appropriated, served and settled in and upon the said Captain John Mason, his heirs and assigns for ever, as for divers special services for the advancement of the said plantation, and other good and sufficient causes and considerations, them especially, thereunto moving, have given, granted, bargained, sold, assigned, aliened, set over, enfeoffed and confirmed, and by those presents do give, grant, bargain, sell, assign, aliene, set over, enfeoff and confirm unto the said Captain John Mason, his heirs and assigns, all that part of the mainland in New-England lying upon the seacoast, beginning from the middle part of Merrimack river, and from thence to proceed northwards along the sea-coast to Pascataqua river [...] and by the said letters patents, the same are amongst other things granted to the said President and Council aforesaid; except two fifths of the ore of gold and silver in these presents hereafter expressed, which said portions of lands, with the appurtenances, the said Capt. John Mason, with the consent of the President and Council, intends to name NEW-HAMPSHIRE.

(The elided portion of this passage contains a lengthy description of the metes and bounds of the territory.)

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004, 279, s.v. Merrimac.

Day, Gordon M. Western Abenaki Dictionary, vol. 1 of 2. Mercury Series Canadian Ethnology Service Paper 128. Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994, 218, 420. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

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

“Grant of New-Hampshire to John Mason, by the Council of Plymouth” (7 November 1629). Provincial and State Papers: Documents and Records Relating to the Province of New-Hampshire, vol. 1 of 10. State Papers Series. Concord, New Hampshire: George E. Jenks, 1867, 22–24.

Irvine, Susan, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition 7 MS E, vol. 7 of 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004, 71, 115. JSTOR. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 636.

Mills, A. D. A Dictionary of British Place Names, revised ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Oxfordreference.com.

Image credit: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 636, fol. 29v. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

off the wall

18 June 2021

The phrase off the wall got its start in American Black slang. It starts appearing in print in the 1950s, but oral use is probably somewhat older. David Claerbaut’s 1972 lexicon Black Jargon in White America defines it thusly:

off the wall, adj. irrelevant; unimportant; uninteresting: an off the wall place. See also lame, Mickey Mouse, tired.

Edith Folb, in her 1980 study of Black slang, Runnin’ Down Some Lines, says it means:

off-the-wall 1. Irrelevant. 2. Nonsensical. 3. Inappropriate. 4. Childish.

Other more general lexicons define it somewhat differently. The Oxford English Dictionary has it as “unorthodox, unconventional; instinctive, intuitive, off the cuff.” And Green’s Dictionary of Slang has the “unimportant, uninteresting” sense, but also includes a separate sense of “bizarre, peculiar.” It is tempting to think of the unorthodox/peculiar sense as being a later variation, but it starts appearing by 1959. So, if it is an outgrowth of the “irrelevant” sense, it is an early one.

Off the wall is clearly in place by the mid-1950s, but since spoken slang almost always precedes its written appearances, it is very likely to have been in use since at least the late 1940s. A hint of earlier use can be found in the 1966 novel A Chosen Few, by Hari Rhodes. Rhodes, who was best known as an actor, served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1949–51, and the novel is based on his experiences being among the first Black marines. Recollections of exact wording that are written down years later must be taken with a grain of salt, so this passage cannot be taken as solid evidence of early use, but it does suggest that the phrase dates to the 1940s:

He blew his cool, called me some off th’ wall names and finally told me what page he was on.

As for solid evidence, Off the Wall appears as the title of an instrumental piece by Marion “Little Walter” Jacobs in 1953. But as the recording has no lyrics, exactly what Jacobs meant by the title is unknown.

And in 1955, Hal Ellson’s (not to be confused with Harlan Ellison) 1955 novel Rock has this:

That disc is off the walls. It’s square, period.

In his 1959 novel Trumbull Park, Frank London Brown uses off the wall three different times, and we start seeing it in the unorthodox/peculiar sense:

Terry said:

“You can't beat the syndicate.”

Seemed like Terry had to keep coming up with those off-the-wall remarks. I was getting sick of this cat:

“What goddamned syndicate?”

"Any syndicate-race syndicate, crime syndicate, big business syndicate, police syndicate-they're all the same. You can't beat them. The Negro has been trying for a century and a half to beat them and look at us-still under attack.”

And a bit later on in the novel:

I don’t know whose church radio program it was that was swinging so nice that January Sunday morning. I mean, organs and choirs and people clapping—not that off-the-wall holyroller kind of clapping, but that happy-in-time easy-going everything-together kind of clapping. Whosever church it was, it was going. I felt happy in my bones, like I had just been sent a message from home.

And the third:

Arthur looked up and laughed sort of quick-like and pulled at his ear; and one by one the brave ones, the not-so-brave ones, the hip ones, the square ones, the men and women—one by one, we all said thanks in our own off-the-wall ways.

And by 1966 we start to see off the wall appearing in the speech of white people. This passage in Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels is about the women who would seek out and attempt to associate with the motorcycle gang. And here it is being used to mean outright strange or wildly unconventional:

Whenever the word "rape” comes up, Terry the Tramp tells the story about the "off-the-wall broad who rolled up to the El Adobe one night in a taxicab—a really fine-lookin chick. She paid the cabbie and just stood there for a minute, lookin at us ... and then, man, she walked across the parking lot like she owned the place and asked us what the hell we were starin at. Then she started laughin. ‘All right!' she yelled. 'I fuck, I suck and I smoke a lot of dope, so let's get started!”

The metaphor underlying the phrase is uncertain, or perhaps fungible depending on what a particular speaker thinks is the underlying metaphor. It can come from the idea of a a ball caroming or bullet ricocheting off a wall, with the accompanying uncertainty as to where it will land. Or it may be an extension of throwing something at a wall to see if it sticks. What does not stick, i.e., that which is not generally acceptable, is off the wall.

Folb discusses the term’s etiology in two passages. The first:

Name terms like jive ass, jive n[——]r, or jive turkey refer to the talker who bounces the conversational ball off the wall, from way out in left field, or who demonstrates ignorance about the subject being discussed. Again, there is the sense of someone out of step.

“Someone comin' from left field, talkin' that bop that don't relate to what you sayin', talkin' nonsense—'Moon gonna fall tonight.’ Just tellin' some jive-ass shit, some off d' wall jokes. Like you settin' dere havin' a good conversation, dude come in talkin' off the wall jive, ‘I'ma burn your ol' lady, moon gonna fall, sun gonna burn.’ Crazy ass hole talkin' trash. Or else, if we all talkin' 'bout dope, and the person say somethin' strange 'bout dope, then you know i's untruth, you say, ‘Man, that's off the wall.’ It don'go along wi' d' conversation.”

And the second:

Because verbal excellence is recognized as an important and powerful way of manipulating others, young blacks early become connoisseurs of good and bad talk, of who shoots blanks and who shoots a good shot. And because many of the verbal contests are played out for others—or are at least within earshot of others—youths have an opportunity to feed back to the contestants how well they are doing.

“Like we was sittin' up at my momma house, sittin' up dere, doin' dis: ‘Boy! That ugly ass bitch, I hear you seein'. 000wheee!!! She look like DEATH, boy! There's somethin' that didn't even dissolve good!’ Now dat righteously funky. He done got down hard an' heavy. Ever'body crack up. ‘Man, he sho' did shoot a shot on him!’ Sometimes dude jus' shoot a blank. His shit jus' off the wall—jus' falls off—don't stick, ain' no good. Nobody say nothin'.

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Sources:

Brown, Frank London. Trumbull Park. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959, 176–77, 223, 354. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Claerbaut, David. Black Jargon in White America. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1972, 74. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Folb, Edith A. Runnin’ Down Some Lines. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980, 43–44, 91, 248. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. off the wall, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. wall, n.1.

Thompson, Hunter S. Hell’s Angels. New York: Random House: 1966, 193. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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.