over a barrel

1912 illustration of a man in an American prison being stretched over a barrel and then flogged with a paddle. A man, clad only in underwear, is tied down, stretched over a barrel screaming, while a prison guard beats him with a paddle. Another prison guard and two men dressed in suits observe.

1912 illustration of a man in an American prison being stretched over a barrel and then flogged with a paddle. A man, clad only in underwear, is tied down, stretched over a barrel screaming, while a prison guard beats him with a paddle. Another prison guard and two men dressed in suits observe.

8 July 2021

To be over a barrel is to be in someone’s power or otherwise in some dire predicament. The phrase is an Americanism that dates to at least 6 June 1890 when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on the conviction of a man for forgery:

A Post-Intelligencer reporeer [sic] called upon McCoombs in the county jail after he had heard the verdict. He appeared in his usual good spirits, and the conviction of forgery seemed to rest lightly upon his mind. He was not disposed to talk about the case. All he would say was: “They tried pretty hard to get me over a barrel up in court today, and I guess they half succeeded, but we will fool ’em yet.”

Another early use from Washington state is from 24 February 1893, when it appears in a Tacoma, Washington news story about a certain “Jumbo” Cantwell attempting to swear out an arrest warrant for a police detective named Flanigan:

Flanigan is alleged to have then told “Jumbo” that he had him “over a barrel and would do him up,” to which “Jumbo” says he replied: “No you won’t.” Then, according to Cantwell, Flanigan grabbed him by the throat, when “Jumbo” struck him in the neck and knocked him down and into a little room off the hallway. Ben Everett then interfered and pulled “Jumbo” off Flanigan.

The detective tells a different story, to the effect that he had told “Jumbo” that he hadn’t talked about him, when the latter called him a liar and assaulted him.

And there is this from 19 February 1900 in a news story about a certain Dr. Tracey (or Treacey, different papers spell the name differently) attempting to bribe a Montana supreme court justice to induce him to dismiss a case. This account was widely syndicated in newspapers across the United States:

Dr. Tracey said he had never had authority from any one to make a proposition of bribery to Mr. Hunt, but he had not told the judge of this circumstance until he was notified that Judge Hunt was to be summoned to Washington. He had then told the judge that he had no $50,000 or $100,000 to offer him and no authority from any one to make such an offer.

Referring to his interviews with Attorney General Nolan, the witness said that when he spoke to that gentleman about the Wellcome case, the latter replied:

“I’ve got them over a barrel.”

“I told him,” said the witness, “that he’d better get $100,000 out of the business, destroy his stenographic notes and get out of the business. He seemed to feel pretty good over it,” continued the witness[, “]and I took it that he thought it was a good idea. It was all pure ‘josh,’ and he knew it was.”

The metaphor underlying over a barrel is not known for certain, but it most likely is an allusion to strapping or holding a person over a barrel in order to flog them. We can see just such a literal use of the phrase in an 1869 bit of doggerel by journalist Marcus M. “Brick” Pomeroy about schoolteachers disciplining children. This is by no means the first such literal use, just an example:

I’d like to be a school-marm,
And with the school-marms stand,
With a bad boy over a barrel
And a spanker in my hand.

It is commonly asserted that over a barrel is nautical in origin and refers to sailors being flogged for various breaches of discipline. But there is no association with the phrase and the navy in the literature, and the practice of the Royal and U.S. Navies was to use a grating, not a barrel, for such punishment.

The Oxford English Dictionary, in an older, unrevised entry, says the metaphor is “apparently in allusion to the state of a person placed over a barrel to clear his lungs of water after being rescued from drowning.” While one can indeed find literal uses of over a barrel in reference to post-drowning resuscitation, this explanation doesn’t accord with the sense of being in someone’s power. The idea of flogging or discipline is more likely the origin.

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Sources:

“Dr. Tracey Declares It Was All ‘a Josh.’” Atlanta Journal, 19 February 1900, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“‘Jumbo’ and Flanigan.” Tacoma Daily News (Washington), 24 February 1893, 7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“M’Coombs Convicted.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Washington), 6 June 1890, 14. Library of Congress: Historical American Newspapers.

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

Pomeroy, Marcus M. “Brick.” Nonsense, or the Hits and Criticisms on the Follies of the Day.” New York: G.W. Carleton, 1869. 225. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tréguer, Pascal. “‘Over a Barrel’” Meaning, Early Instances and Probable Origin.” Wordhistories.net, 5 May 2021.

Image credit: M.L. Bracker, 1912. From Julian Leavitt. “The Man in the Cage.” The American Magazine, 73.5, March 1912, 537 . Google Books. Public domain image.

Idaho

Pocatello, Idaho in 1892. A sepia-toned photograph of a town with mountains behind.

Pocatello, Idaho in 1892. A sepia-toned photograph of a town with mountains behind.

7 July 2021

Idaho is a place name taken from a Native American source, but exactly which one and what it means is uncertain, and several stories have arisen in attempts to explain the name. Complicating matters, exactly where Idaho is has changed, originally referring to an area that roughly corresponds to present-day Colorado. The name arises out of a nineteenth-century settler-colonist fondness for Indigenous facades with little regard for actual Indigenous culture.

The most likely source of the name is the Kiowa-Apache (Athabascan) word ídaahé (enemy), a reference to the Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Commanche) people, whose territory included eastern Colorado.

The name Idaho is first recorded as a potential name for the territory that would become Colorado. From Albany Evening Journal of 26 March 1860 (the “gem of the mountains” translation is patently false, as we shall see):

The Pike’s Peak Territory has plenty of names to choose from. The Senate Committee have before them the following names—“Tampa,” interpreted Bear; “Idahoe,” meaning Gem of the Mountains; Nemara,” “Colorado,” “San Juan,” “Lula,” interpreted Mountain Fairy; “Weapollah,” “Arrapahoe,” the name of the Indian tribe inhabiting the Pike’s Peak region, “Tahosa,” which means Dwellers on the Mountain Tops; “Lafayette,” “Columbus,” “Franklin” and “Jefferson.”

Idaho won out at first, but within a year the territory’s name had been changed to Colorado. From the New York Herald of 5 February 1861:

The bill providing a government for the Pike’s Peak region was taken up. The name of the territory was changed from Idaho to Colorado, and the bill passed.

But the name wasn’t dead. A county in the Washington territory was being called Idaho County by 1862. Washington’s Idaho County roughly corresponded to the territory of the present-day state. From an article in the Morning Oregonian of 28 June 1862 about a petition to the postmaster general for increased mail service in the territory that proposed, among other requests:

A route from Lewiston to Florence City, in Idaho county, 110 miles, a weekly service.

And the next year, the following notice was posted in the 6 March 1863 Buffalo Morning Express:

Dr. J.N. [sic] Wallace, delegate from Washington Territory in the Thirty-Seventh Congress, is talked of for Governor of Idaho Territory.

(The first governor of the territory would be someone else, William H. Wallace. He was the uncle of Lew Wallace, a Civil War general and author of Ben Hur.)

The Idaho Territory would become the forty-third state on 3 July 1890.

While the Kiowa-Apache word ídaahé is the most likely candidate for the origin of the name, there are several other explanations that are commonly proffered. One is that it is a Shoshone name meaning “sun coming down the mountain,” but this appears to be an after-the-fact assembling of Shoshone words to create a name. Working against this explanation is that while the Shoshone people resided in what is now present-day Idaho, they were not in Colorado, which is where the term originated.

Another, patently false, explanation is that it means “gem of the mountains” in some Indigenous language, which varies in the telling. This explanation appears to have been fabricated by George M. Willing, who was the territorial delegate for what would become Colorado in 1860. The following 1875 letter by a William O. Stoddard to the New York Tribune details Willing’s claim to have coined Idaho:

My eccentric friend, the late Dr. George M. Willing was the first delegate to Congress from the young mining community. At the time when the subject of the new Territory was under debate, he was, as a matter of course, on the floor of the House of Representatives. Various names had been proposed without any seeming[?] approach to agreement, and the Doctor, whose familiarity with Indian dialects was pretty well known, was appealed to by some of his legislative friends for a suggestion. One of the said: “Something round and smooth, now, with the right sort of meaning to it.” Now it happened that the little daughter of one of those gentlemen was on the floor that morning with her father, and the Doctor, who was fond of children, had just been calling her to him with, “Ida, ho, come and see me.”

Nothing could be better, and the veteran explorer promptly responded with the name, “Idaho.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Gem of the Mountains,” replied the quick-witted Doctor, with a glance at the fresh-face beside him, and the interpretation, like the name, has “stuck” to this day. Dr. Willing told me about it at the time, or soon afterward, with a most gleeful appreciation of the humor of the thing, and I have often heard him rehearse the story.

The bit about the little girl seems too fantastic to be true. But assuming this account is a somewhat accurate recollection, it is clear from reading it that Willing made the “gem of the mountains” claim out of whole cloth. What might have happened is that the name Idaho was proposed, and people asked Willing what it meant, and he fabricated an etymology on the spot. But the false explanation did have staying power, as you can hear it repeated even today.

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Sources:

Albany Evening Journal (New York), 26 March 1860, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

“By Telegraph.” Buffalo Morning Express (Buffalo, New York), 6 March 1863, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

“Increased Mail Service.” Morning Oregonian (Portland), 28 June 1862, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The News.” New York Herald, 5 February 1861, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. Idaho, n.

Stoddard, William O. “How Idaho Was Named” (letter, 8 December 1875). New York Tribune (New York City), 11 December 1875, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: 1892, probably taken by Charles Roscoe Savage. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Public domain image.

orange

Two navel oranges, one whole and the other cut into pieces

Two navel oranges, one whole and the other cut into pieces

6 July 2021

One would think that color terms are basic to the language and would be among the earliest words recorded, but this is not always the case. In English, for example, orange is a relatively late addition to the language, dating to the mid sixteenth century. The color orange comes to us from the name of the fruit, which is recorded in English before the hue. The English orange is borrowed from French, which in turn comes from the Italian arancio, which is from the Arabic naranj—and is a nice example of rebracketing, un naranj dropping the second <n> and becoming un arancio. And the Arabic comes from the Persian narang, a sequence that nicely portrays the relevant trade route through which the then-exotic fruit would pass.

The fruit is first recorded in English in the fourteenth century in a Latin-English dictionary, the Sinonoma Bartholomei:

Citrangulum pomum, orenge.

These medieval oranges weren’t the ones we usually find in grocery stores today. They were the bitter or Seville orange (Citrus aurantium). Sweet oranges, like the Valencia, weren’t imported to Europe until the sixteenth century.

The color orange is recorded by 1557, but there are some precursor appearances earlier in the century. The phrase orenge colour appears in a will dated 1512. This is a neat example of the transition from the fruit to the color. It’s not a name for the hue, but rather a description of it that uses the fruit. Also, Wikipedia cites a 1502 appearance of orange, but only gives secondary sources as references and doesn’t not specify the document the word allegedly appears in. I wonder if this 1502 appearance is of orange color as well, as opposed to an antedating of the stand-alone orange.

The 1577 appearance of the stand-alone orange, meaning the color, is in an English law limiting the colors in which woolen cloth could be made:

And moreover, be it enacted by the authority aforesaid that no person nor persons after the said feast of the nativity of St. John Baptist shall sell or put to sale within the realm of England any coloured cloth of any other colour or colours than are hereafter mentioned, that is to say, scarlet, red, crimson, morrey, violet, pewke, brown, blue, black, green, yellow, blue, orange, tawny, russet, marble grey, sad new colour, azure, watchet, sheeps colour, lion colour, motly, iron grey, friers grey, crane colour, purple, and old medley colour, most commonly used to be made above and before twenty years past.

Orange is also the name of a town in Provence, southern France, but this name is etymologically unrelated to the fruit or the color—although it has since become associated with the color. The town’s and associated principality’s name is from the Latin Arausio, named after a Celtic god. Over the centuries this came to be pronounced and spelled as orange.

The Dutch royal family is descended from the princes of Orange in Provence, hence the association of the color with Holland. And King William III of England, of the duo William and Mary, was the prince of Orange. Through him, the color became associated with Protestantism, particularly Protestantism in Northern Ireland.

References to the principality can be found in English by 1540. There is this letter written by the poet and diplomat Thomas Wyatt to Henry VIII on 9 March 1540. Wyatt was in Flanders on a diplomatic mission and toward the end of the letter he reports on the status of Christina of Denmark, the Duchess of Milan. After the death of Jane Seymour, his third wife, Henry had attempted to marry Christina. But being aware of how Henry treated his wives, she had no interest in him and the negotiations fell through, and Henry ended up marrying, for a short while, Anne of Cleves. In the letter, Wyatt reports that the then-current queen’s brother, the Duke of Cleves, was courting Christina, but that she was really in love with René of Chalon, the Prince of Orange, and, in an obvious attempt to stay on the good side of the mercurial and autocratic king, that Henry is lucky to have escaped that marriage:

Adde to this that it is here sayd, and the Duke of Cleves owne servant told it me to[o] that he herd it of men of reputation that thei were abowt to gyve the Duke of Cleves a mariage of the Duchesse of Millan. And to confirme that I note that the king of Romaines promising to do the best he cowld for the Duke toward th'emperour aduisid hym not to seme to insult against th'emperour but rather to go humbly to work with hym, and he shold have the best mene he cowld.

I aduertisid hym to aduise his master in Case of mariage to vse his ffrendes Councell. And herein, if I shalbe plaine with your maiestie, I can not but reioyse in maner the skape that yow made there. Ffor altho I suppose nothing but honor in the lady, yet me thinkyth your highnes make wold be withowt note or suspect. And there is thowght affection bytwene the prynce of Orenge and her, and hath bene of long; wich for her bringing vp in Italy may be notyd but service wich she can not let, yet I have herd it to procede partly from her own occasion. Off this your maiestie juge and do with your ffrend as ye shall think mete.

Henry would end up sending Anne of Cleves packing shortly after this letter was written and marrying his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. Anne spent the rest of her days living quietly on an estate in the English countryside. Christina ended up marrying the future Duke of Lorraine, so she didn’t end up with the spouse she wanted, but she did end up better off than Catherine Howard, who lost her head. None of this is really related to orange, but it’s better than anything a Hollywood scriptwriter could dream up, and it’s just the sort of juicy tidbit you find when you start looking at the contexts in which words are used.

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Sources:

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

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. orange, n.

Mowat, J.L.G. Sinonoma Bartholomei. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Orange (colour).” Wikipedia. Accessed 11 July 2021.  

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. orange, n.1 and adj.1, Orange, n.2 and adj.2, orange colour | orange color, n. (and adj.)

Pickering, Danby, ed. “An Act Touching the Making of Woolen Clothes” (1557). The Statutes at Large, from the First Year of Queen Mary, to the Thirty-Fifth Year of Queen Elizabeth, Inclusive, vol. 6. Cambridge: Joseph Bentham, 1763, 100. Google Books.

Wyatt, Thomas. “Letter to Henry VIII” (9 March 1540). Kenneth Muir. Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1963, 148–49. HathiTrust Digital Archive. British Library, MS Harley 282.

Photo credit: Evan-Amos, 2012. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

 

Prince Edward Island

Green Gables House, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. The farmhouse that inspired the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Montgomery. Canadian law requires a reference to the novel in every article about the island (not really, it just seems that way). A white clapboard house with a green gabled roof.

Green Gables House, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. The farmhouse that inspired the 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Montgomery. Canadian law requires a reference to the novel in every article about the island (not really, it just seems that way). A white clapboard house with a green gabled roof.

2 July 2021

Prince Edward Island is the smallest in area of the Canadian provinces and territories. It is an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, lying just off the northern and eastern coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Its Mi’kmaq name is Epekwitk (cradled on the waves), which is often transliterated as Abegweit.

The French dubbed it Île Saint-Jean, and until 1799 it was known to the English settler-colonists as St. John’s Island. But in that year, it was renamed after Edward, the son of King George III, who commanded British forces in Nova Scotia from 1794–98, when a fall from a horse forced his return to England for recovery. He was subsequently created Duke of Kent, and Strathearn and returned to North America in command of all British forces there. He also subsequently fathered a daughter who would become Queen Victoria.

The following is a 25 January 1799 letter from Edward thanking the government and people of what would soon become Prince Edward Island for petitioning the king to rename the island in his honor. Edward only obliquely refers to the “honour,” but when it was later published in the Sun newspaper, the editors noted that the island had been renamed after him:

To His Excellency Major-General EDMUND FANNING, L.L.D. Lieutenant-Governor, &c. &c. in and over His Majesty’s Island of St. John, and His Majesty’s Council and House of Assembly, &c. &c. &c.

“GENTLEMEN,

“I am highly flattered by the distinguished Honour conferred upon me in your Address of the 26th of November, 1798, for which I have to request that you will accept of my best Thanks.

“Nothing could be more gratifying to my feelings, than to receive the assurance of your devoted attachment to His Majesty, and the whole of his Family; nor could any thing be more pleasing personally to myself, than to learn that you were so good as to feel for the accident which occasioned my departure from North America.

“I feel as I ought to do, the very handsome manner in which you are pleased to speak of the attention I was enabled (in the line of my Profession), to pay to the concerns of the Island to which you belong; and believe me, that I shall ever feel great pride in the recollection of the public testimony you have thus given of your approbation of my Services while in the Command of your District.

“I shall conclude, Gentlemen, with offering my warmest acknowledgements for the good wishes so handsomely expressed at the end of your Address, and desiring you to believe that I shall ever take the warmest interest in everything that concerns the Island of St. John’s.

“EDWARD,
“Lieutenant-General, late commanding the Forces in Nova Scotia and its Dependencies.

“London, January 25, 1799.”

N.B. The above Island has since been honoured by the name of Prince Edward Island.

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Sources:

Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn. “Letter.” The Sun (London), 12 October 1799, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

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

Pearce, Margaret Wickens. Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada (map). Canadian-American Center, University of Maine, 2017.

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

Photo credit: Markus Gregory http://ggrexy.zenfolio.com/ , 2014. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.