think outside the box

July 19, 2021

Illustration of the connect-the-dots puzzle that accompanied the 1971 article in Data Management — Illustration of the connect-the-dots puzzle that accompanied the 1971 article in *Data Management*

19 July 2021

To think outside the box is to disregard artificial constraints on creativity, to engage in unconventional thought processes. The phrase as we know it arises from a puzzle used as an exercise in creative thinking. The phrase also has a precursor with slightly different wording: think outside the dots.

In the puzzle, nine dots are arranged on a 3×3 grid, and the participants are asked to connect the dots with four straight lines and without lifting the pencil from the paper. Most participants will keep their lines within the box defined by the grid, but the only solution, as shown in the accompanying illustration, is to extend the lines beyond the boundaries of the grid. The point being the restriction of keeping within the boundaries is an artificial one, imposed by the participants themselves and by extension that other, real-world, problems can be solved if only people disregard analogous artificial constraints.

While the phrase arose in the middle of the twentieth century, the metaphor underlying it is quite old, older than the puzzle itself. For example, there is this from an 1888 account of the British Parliament that uses think outside the lines:

He said that, having changed at Mr. Gladstone’s signal, from all but unanimous repudiation of Home Rule in 1885, to its enthusiastic support in 1887, the Liberal party became a one-man party, which scarcely ventured to think outside the lines prescribed by its dictator.

Other such framing of the metaphor can undoubtedly be found.

The earliest reference to the puzzle that I have found is in a religion column by the Rev. John F. Anderson in the Dallas Morning News of 30 October 1954. Anderson relates an account, real or imagined, of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor using the puzzle in a class with graduate students. He uses go outside the dots; the think would come a bit later:

“But prof,” one student protested, “that is not fair. You went outside the dots.”
“Who said you couldn’t?” was his disarming reply.
“Young men,” he continued, “we are not here to go through old routines. Don’t let your thinking be contained in a small square of knowledge. Learn to go “outside the dots” and you may be the one to solve some of man’s most puzzling problems.

A later use (see below) of the phrase by another preacher, makes me think the anecdote may have circulated in volumes of sermon illustrations that provide preachers with ideas for sermons.

But within a decade the puzzle and its accompanying lesson starts appearing in business management courses. From an article about just such a course in the 18 April 1963 Springfield Union:

We must ask ourselves: “What are the actual boundaries of the problem?” Perhaps, some of you have seen this little problem before. Here are nine dots, arranged in a square[.]
The problem is to connect all the dots by drawing four straight lines without removing the chalk from the black board and without retracing. Try it!
Did you first attempt to draw the lines within the boundaries of the nine dots? There is no rule that requires it. The solution demands that some of the lines extend into the space outside the dots.

And again from the Dallas Morning News, this time of 15 May 1964, is this list of courses at a conference of women accountants:

Speakers and their subjects will be Miss Ouida Albright of Fort Worth, Effective Use of Your Time; Mrs. Lauer, Managerial Accounting; Miss Ruth Reynolds of Tulsa, Okla., Internal Controls; Mrs. Engel, How to Conduct a Conference; Mrs. Mary Crowley, Going Outside the Dots, and C.L. Bateman of Tulsa, Cost Reduction in the Office.

But we don’t have the full think outside the dots. That comes by 23 May 1970 in a column in the Ottawa Journal. It uses the phrase, but the column makes no explicit reference to or explanation of the puzzle. The writer assumes the reader is familiar with it, or at least with the concept:

The problem, says William Davd [sic] Hopper, is to think “outside the dots” about questions of how to feed a hungry world.
He means that the need is to think imaginatively, creatively about the development of less-developed countries, and not merely to keep pouring more money and technology into patterns of foreign aid established, not very successfully, over the past 20 years.

While the column co-locates all the words in the phrase, its use of quotation marks separates think from outside the dots, indicating that the think was not yet part of the standard phrasing.

We get the complete phrase by 6 July 1980, when it appears in another newspaper column, this time in the Miami Herald:

Mrs. Roe was my English teacher in junior high school in Miami. One dictum ruled her classroom—and, I suspect, her life—and occasionally in a fit of passion she’d scrawl on the blackboard in letters a foot high: THINK OUTSIDE THE DOTS!
More often she uttered it—hurled it, really—and everyone came to know the pattern, to watch for it, to even relish it. She’d ask a question, get no response. A minute would pass while she still stared at us: a hush would fall. Then all at once she’d cry, “Think outside the dots! Think outside the dots!”

Think outside the dots is still in use, although it is far less common than think outside the box. Here is a more recent example of think outside the dots from the Trenton Evening Times of 28 February 2010:

Challenge brings success
Architect J. Robert Hillier says you have to “think outside the dots”
[...]
“It’s a great puzzle,” he explains, brandishing a pencil and solving the challenge. “But you have to go outside the dots. You have to extend the line beyond the rectangle. That the trouble with so many people.
“When people are confronted with the puzzle—any puzzle—they try to stay inside those dots. And the key to beating it,” Hillier adds with a smile, “is to go outside.”

The box wording can be traced to a 26 October 1969 newspaper column by preacher and self-help guru Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was enormously popular and influential, and his column would have been widely syndicated and read, and he is certainly responsible for much of the phrase’s popularity. Although, as with outside the dots, he doesn’t use the full phrasing of think outside the box:

There is one particular puzzle you may have seen. It’s a drawing of a box with some dots in it, and the idea is to connect all the dots by using only four lines. You can work and work on that puzzle, but the only way to solve it is to draw the lines to [sic] they connect outside the box. It’s simple, once you realize the principle behind it. But if you keep trying to solve it inside the box, you’ll never be able to master that particular puzzle.
That puzzle represents the way a lot of people think. They get caught up inside the box of their own lives. You’ve got to approach any problem objectively. Stand back and see it for exactly what it is. From a little distance, you can see it a lot more clearly. Try and get a different perspective, a fresh point of view. Step outside the box your problem has created within you and come at it from a different direction.

The full phrase think outside the box dates to a few years later and the September 1971 issue of the journal Data Management:

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX
If you have kept your thinking process operating inside the lines and boxes, then you are normal and average, for that is the way your thinking has been programmed. Unfortunately, we have accepted thought process limitations that are artificial. They are man-made and do not exist in reality.

And as with the dots version, within a decade the phrase think outside the box could be used without explicit reference to the puzzle, assuming the readers would understand what was meant. From a syndicated medical column of 23 March 1978 by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn:

Some of my best teachers have been those who utilize the techniques of shock and surprise to rouse me out of conventional habits of thought, forcing me to question accepted teaching and stimulating me to “think outside the box.”

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Sources:

Anderson, John F. “Down to Earth.” Dallas Morning News (Texas), 30 October 1954, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1887. London: Rivingtons, 1888, 168. Google Books.

Barnebey, Faith. “On the Draft: ‘Think Outside the Dots!’” Miami Herald (Florida), 6 July 1980, 1–E. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Challenge Brings Success.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 28 February 2010, D1, D3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Inventiveness, Motivation, Training Needs of Scientists.” Springfield Union (Massachusetts), 18 April 1963, 52. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Mendelsohn, Robert. “People’s Doctor.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans) (syndicated), 23 March 1978, 4–7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Notaro, Michael R. “Management of Personnel: Organizational Patterns and Techniques.” Data Management, 9.9, September 1971, 77. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

O’Toole, Garson. “Antedating of ‘Outside the Box.’” ADS-L, 3 May 2010.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2021, s.v. box, n.2.

Peale, Norman Vincent. “Confident Living: Never Give Up.” Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 26 October 1969, 23. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tréguer, Pascal. “‘To Think Outside the Box’: Meaning and Origin.” Wordhistories.net . 28 April 2021.

Westell, Anthony. “Ottawa in Perspective: Canada Entering Big League in Research.” Ottawa Journal, 23 May 1970, 7. Newspapers.com.

“Women Accountants to Sponsor Seminar.” Dallas Morning News (Texas), 15 May 1964, 3–2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Notaro, Michael R. “Management of Personnel: Organizational Patterns and Techniques.” Data Management, 9.9, September 1971, 77. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Washington (DC & state)

July 16, 2021

Detail of an 1887 copy of Pierre L’Enfant’s 1790 plan for Washington, DC, showing the major streets, the Mall, Congress House (i.e., the Capitol) and the President’s House (i.e., what would become known as the White House)

16 July 2021

Washington may very well be the most common toponym in the United States. In addition to the state and the federal capital, numerous counties, towns, streets, and other places are named for the country’s first president, George Washington.

The name Washington has been associated with the District of Columbia since 1791. Washington was founded to be the capital of the United States, carved out of the territories of Maryland and Virginia, and included the already existing towns of Georgetown and Alexandria. (The Virginia portion, including Alexandria, was later ceded back to Virginia.) I cannot find any official documents designating the newly founded city as such—I’m sure they exist; I just haven’t found them—but there is this from the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser of 23 September 1791:

On Thursday last was killed, in the city of Washington, and in the district of Columbia, by the falling of a tree, in opening one of the streets, Mr. WALTER HANSON, jun. a gentleman of great mechanical ingenuity, and unblemished reputation. He was in the employ of Mr. Ellicott, as one of his assistants.—He has left a disconsolate widow, four small children, and many friends to lament his untimely fate.

And the same paper a week later, on 30 September 1791, published a description of the plans for the new city, which began:

The City of WASHINGTON, in the district of Columbia, intended for the permanent seat of the Government of the United States, being now begun, a concise description of the situation, and present state of that metropolis, may not be altogether uninteresting to those at a distance.

There is also the state of Washington, of course, that is occasionally the source of confusion with the nation’s capital. That name dates to 1853 when the territory that would become the state was split from the Oregon Territory. Two names were in serious contention for the new territory, Washington and Columbia. The name Washington won out, despite some objections that it would cause confusion with the nation’s capital. (The fact that Columbia might cause confusion with the District of Columbia apparently was not a serious concern.) New York’s Weekly Herald of 12 February 1853 summarizes the congressional debate:

The House proceeded to act on the bill establishing the territorial government of Washington, the question being on concurring in the amendments reported from the Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union.
Mr. JONES, (dem) of Tenn., moved to lay it on the table. Negatived, by ayes 26, noes 99.
The question being stated on agreeing to the title of the bill, to change the name from Columbia to that of Washington.
Mr. EVANS, (whig,) of Md., said he supposed that there was not in the whole United States one dissenting voice against doing all honor to George Washington, but he wished, if possible, to change the name of the proposed territory, for the single reason that there are two hundred towns and counties called Washington. His object was to avoid confusion in nomenclature.
Mr. STUART (dem.) of Mich., remarked that he did not like the name of Columbia changed, but, seeing it was the will of the majority to substitute that of Washington, he would interpose no objection.
Mr. EVANS said he made the remark to be heard elsewhere. He thought it was far more proper to call the capital of the Union after the name of Washington; and, to avoid difficulties of geographical nomenclature, he trusted one of the beautiful Indian names would be given to the new Territory.
The title of the bill was then changed to the “Territorial Government of Washington.”
The bill was afterwards passed, by 128 yeas to 29 nays.

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Sources:

“For the Maryland Journal” (26 September 1791). Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 30 September 1791, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“George-Town, September 17. Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, 23 September 1791, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Territory of Washington.” Weekly Herald (New York), 12 February 1853, 51. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Original: Pierre Charles L’Enfant, 1790. Copy: U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1887. Library of Congress.

Northwest Territories

July 15, 2021

15 July 2021

The rather unimaginatively designated Northwest Territories were organized and formally named in 1869. Prior to this, the land was referred to informally as the Northwestern Territory. It was once much larger than it is today, including what are now the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nunavut, Yukon, and parts of British Columbia. When the territory of Yukon was taken from it in 1897, the northwest in the name became something of a misnomer but was retained.

The Northwest Territories, as a settler-colonist creation, has no corresponding Indigenous name. However, the capital Yellowknife, on the northern shore of Tideè (Great Lake, a.k.a. Great Slave Lake) is named after the First Nations band that live in the area. Yellowknife is a loose translation of the Tłįchǫ, or Dogrib, (Northern Athabaskan) T'satsąot'ınę, which literally means metal or copper people, a reference to their production and use of copper tools.

While the Northwest Territories was officially organized and named in 1869, use of the lower-case northwest territories to refer to the region dates to at least 1857, when the term appears in London’s Morning Chronicle of 27 August. Unsurprisingly, the article is about the natural resources in the region that the British can exploit:

By the undeniable authorities quoted in my previous communications to your journal, the fact is established that, in addition to many other useful minerals—gold, silver, cinnabar, copper, malachite, iron, lead, tin, coal, petroleum, sulphur, plumbago, soapstone, porcelain clay, gypsum, many beautiful varieties of jasper, and fine porphyry, tourmaline, cornelian, and brilliant and precious garnets have been found (some of them in vast quantities) in many parts of the Hudson’s Bay and north-west territories, the northern portions of which (intended by the Colonial-office to be left in the hands of the company for ever) being even more valuable in these products than the southern.

The North-West Territories Proclamation of 2 December 1869, which calls the territory officially into existence as of the previous day, reads in part:

And whereas her majesty has declared and named the first day of December instant as the day for the admission of Rupert’s land and the North-Western Territory into the union and Dominion of Canada; and whereas by virtue and in pursuance of the British North American Act of 1867, the Rupert’s land Act of eighteen hundred and sixty-eight, the said act for the temporary government of Rupert’s land and the North-western Territory when united with Canada, and the said declaration and order of her majesty, Rupert’s land and the north-western territory have been admitted into union with, and have now become part of the dominion of Canada, and are henceforth to be known as the north-west Territories.

The Northwest Territories officially came into existence in 1869, and in that year the Red River Rebellion began, when Métis and First Nations allies under the leadership of Louis Riel who objected to the terms under which the land, known as Rupert’s Land, was being transferred from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada. An article in Washington, DC’s National Intelligencer of 20 December 1869 uses the proper name. The use of half-breeds in the article is a derogatory reference to the Métis. (The Métis are one of the three major groups of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the other two being the First Nations and the Inuit. The Métis are mix of French and Indigenous ancestry but who maintain a distinct culture.) Fort Garry is an old name for the city of Winnipeg:

Colonel Dennis, Dominion Surveyor General of the Northwest Territories, has succeeded in raising and arming some two hundred Swampy Indians and a number of their English half-breed relations, and that they have garrisoned the stone fort so as to form a junction with the Canadians, Sioux, and Minnesetas at Portage La Prairie, and will march upon the provisional force near Fort Garry.

The Red River Rebellion was suppressed in 1870, but the Canadian government ended up granting some of the demands of Riel and the Métis, including the formation of the separate province of Manitoba, which was carved out of the Northwest Territories.

Discuss this post

Sources:

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

“The Hudson’s Bay and North-West Territories as a Field for British Enterprise.” Morning Chronicle (London), 27 August 1857, 3. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 20 December 1869, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

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.

“The Red River Rebellion.” Bangor Daily Whig and Courier (Bangor, ME), 1 April 1870, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“We Are T’satsąot’inę: Renaming Yellowknife.” Edgenorth.ca, 31 August 2016.

Yellowknives Dene First Nation.

Image credit: Northwest Territories Proclamation. Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN ID number 123044. Public domain image.

Manitoba

July 14, 2021

14 July 2021

Like many other North American place names derived from Indigenous names, the exact origin of Manitoba and its original meaning are uncertain. The early European explorers, fur trappers, and settler-colonists were generally not very good at recording Indigenous languages. But the name most likely comes from an Algonquian language, either the Ojibwa Manito-Bah or Cree Manito-Wapow, both meaning “strait of the spirit,” a reference to the sound of the water on the shores along the narrows of what is now called Lake Manitoba. A less likely possibility is that it is from the Assiniboine (Western Siouan) Mini-Tobow, meaning “lake of the prairie.”

The name was first applied to Lake Manitoba, and only later to the surrounding territory. The earliest English-language reference to the name I have found is from Alexander MacKenzie’s 1801 A General History of Fur Trade from Canada to the North-West:

The next river of magnitude is the river Dauphin, which empties itself at the head of St. Martin's Bay, on the West side of the Lake Winipic, latitude nearly 52. 15. North, taking its source in the same mountains as the last-mentioned river, as well as the Swan and Red-Deer River, the latter passing through the lake of the same name, as well as the former, and both continuing their course through the Manitoba Lake, which, from thence, runs parallel with Lake Winipic, to within nine miles of the Red River, and by what is called the river Dauphin, disembogues its waters, as already described, into that Lake.

From the English perspective, the territory that makes up present-day Manitoba was administered by the Hudson’s Bay Company starting in the seventeenth-century. The French started trading in the area in the 1730s, and in 1779 the Montreal-based North-West Company was formed, which competed with Hudson’s Bay, sometimes violently. The two companies would merge in 1821, but the following account of events from 1816, published in 1819, describes the origin of one such violent incident between the competing companies. The account is written by Frederick Damien Heurter, an employee of the North-West Company. The use of half-breed is a derogatory reference to the Métis people of the region. (The Métis are one of the three major Indigenous groups in Canada, originating from the intermarriage of European and Indigenous people, but maintaining a distinct culture. The other two groups are the First Nations and the Inuit.) Heurter wrote:

Alexander McDonell, partner of the North-West Company, arrived at Fort Douglas the 3rd of September, when he was received with discharges of artillery, and treated the half-breeds with a ball and plenty to drink, the same evening. Next day news arrived, that Peter Fidler, a trader in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company had arrived, with an assortment of goods at Lake Manitoba, having sent word to the freemen to go and receive some payments due to them; when this was reported to Alexander McDonell, he said “Que Diable qu'est-ce qu'il a à faire là, il faut aller le piller" [What the Devil is he doing here? We have to go and loot him]. The sarne day he told me to hold myself in readiness to go next morning with a party of half-breeds to pillage the said Petet Fidler, to which I made no answer.

The Hudson’s Bay Company ceded its land to Canada in 1869, and the province of Manitoba was formed in 1870. But this original “postage-stamp” province was only one-eighteenth of the province’s current size. The province gradually grew, taking land from the Northwest Territories, until 1912, when it reached its current size.

Discuss this post

Sources:

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

Heurter, Frederick Damien. “Narrative of Frederick Damien Heurter, late Acting Serjeant-Major, and Clerk in the Regiment of De Meuron.” Narratives of John Pritchard, Pierre Chrysologue Pambrun, and Frederick Damien Heurter, Respecting the Aggressions of the North-West Company, Against the Earl of Selkirk’s Settlement Upon Red River. London: John Murray, 1819, 76. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

MacKenzie, Alexander. A General History of Fur Trade from Canada to the North-West. 1801, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Image Credit: Historical Hand-Atlas. Chicago: H.H. Hardesty, 1882, 40–41. Library of Congress.

unmentionables

July 13, 2021

13 June 2021

Euphemisms can pose a problem for etymologists because it’s not always clear to exactly what the euphemism refers. Such is the case with the word unmentionables. That word can refer to various articles of clothing or to various body parts. Unmentionables is most often thought today to be a Victorian euphemism for underwear, but that’s not strictly accurate. While the word was used in the Victorian era and while it could refer to underwear, the euphemism predates Victoria and more often than not, referred to something other than underwear.

The earliest use of the term that I know of appears in the London newspaper The Argus for 11 April 1791. Exactly what article of clothing is unmentionable here is a bit ambiguous. The use of “leather stocking fashion” makes on think it refers to stockings, made of leather, that are gartered above the knee, made famous in the next century in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. But the headline’s use of “breeches” indicates what is being referred to are knee-breeches or knickerbockers (cf. knickerbockers). Since leatherstockings were typically worn by those working outdoors, the use here may indicate the fashion is considered crude and rustic rather than referring to a specific type of clothing. The objection to knee-breeches here is not because they expose what should be private, but rather because they are considered a horrid new fashion:

Mrs. MONTAGUE and the BREECHES.
In a conversation held the other day at Mrs. MONTAGUE’S, in Portman Square, among a party of blue stocking Ladies, the topic ran on the present leather stocking fashion—and strange as it may appear, in a whole hour’s discussion, the fair debaters never once uttered the name this odious part of a man’s dress; upon which Mrs. MONTAGUE declared they were truly and properly to be called unmentionables, as the prudes of the age had titled them.

While it doesn’t use the word unmentionables, this 1792 song, “The Golden Days We Now Possess,” uses the synonym inexpressibles to refer to underwear, the first use of the concept to refer to those articles of clothing. Again, there is some ambiguity as small clothes in the 1790s could refer to knee-breeches as well as underwear, but the context of this specific poem (i.e., the “promontories” are the buttocks and the discussion is of women’s fashion) tells us what is meant:

Such promontories, sure, may be styl’d inaccessibles,
As our small-cloaths, by prudes, are pronounc’d inexpressibles;
And the taste of our beaus won’t admit of dispute, Sir,
When they ride in their slippers, and walk about in boots, Sir.

But as mentioned, because it’s a euphemism, sometimes it’s difficult to parse exactly what is meant by unmentionables. For example, the following from Wright’s Leeds Intelligencer of 13 November 1815 might be thought to refer to women’s underwear, but it actually refers to women wearing trousers on stage. The key to unlocking the meaning is the Latin phrase, which translates as “what is characteristic for men”:

An eminent schoolmaster being asked why he disliked to see an actress in unmentionables, said, it was contrary to propria quae maribus.

The use of unmentionables, as opposed to the above inexpressibles, to refer to underwear is documented by 1833, still prior to the Victorian era. It appears in the New York paper Ely’s Hawk & Buzzard of 14 September 1833. Ironically, the writer acknowledges the euphemism’s ambiguity by mentioning what is unmentionable:

P.S. A few pair of red flannel unmentionables are wanted. [signed] red flannel drawers

And as late as the 1880s unmentionables could still be used unironically to refer to trousers, as this advertisement in the 5 December 1883 St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat indicates. Although, while not exactly ironic, the discussion of vocabulary does display a dislike for the term, preferring plain speech:

“Nothing in a name.”
So Shakspeare [sic] says, but we can’t altogether agree with the eminent bard. We don’t think a rose would smell half as sweet if it should be reclassified among the flowers as a “cabbage.” The plebeian title would detract from its beauty and we wouldn’t be satisfied with the change. Among our customers some gents insist that pantaloons are “INEXPRESSIBLES,” some say “UNMENTIONABLES,” some “TROUSERS,” others “PANTS.” But the fact remains unaltered that they are PANTALOONS, and the FAMOUS is now displaying the largest stock in all-wool fabrics from $3 50 up to $7 ever seen in this city of mud and dust. If you need a pair come to
FIFTH AND MORGAN
Largest Clothing, Shoe, Hat, Furnishing Goods and Cloak Dealers in the West.

But unmentionables referred not just to clothing. It could also refer to body parts. But again, which anatomical part varied with the context. Here is an early use of the sense from the 1 August 1824 issue of Bell’s Life in London in an article discussing a carriage accident. Exactly where the good gentleman was injured is left purposefully vague:

We forgot to mention a very awkward compound fracture in Sir Edmund Nagle’s unmentionables—a fracture which was the more distressing to the gallant Admiral, inasmuch as it made it impossible for him to render any material assistance to the Ladies. However, he was on horseback next day as well as if nothing had happened.

But this description of a boxing match in the London Morning Chronicle of 6 July 1825 makes it clear through context that unmentionables refers to the buttocks:

Round 1. Stockman, on coming to the scratch, could not fail to see that Sam stood well over him; but still he seemed determined on mischief, and measuring his length, he opened his battery with a left-handed hit. Sam was awake, stopped the blow, and returned in earnest. The men fought to a rally, when Sam, after the manner of Dick Curtis, drew back, and as Stockman followed, he jobbed [sic] him with his left on the nose repeatedly. At length Stockman fell on his unmentionables [cheers for Sam].

And it seems that referring to any part of the body, even one as innocent as the foot, could be labeled as unmentionable. Here is one from the Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album of 23 December 1826 that uses the word to refer to a corn other sore spot on the foot:

In the banquet scene, when Macbeth shrunk from the appalling Banquo, it had such a sympathetic effect upon a gentleman who sat by my aunt, that he unluckily brought the heel of his boot in contact with an unmentionable on her toe, which set her just in sorts for harmonizing the rest of the evening.

And, of course, unmentionables could refer to the genitals. Here is one such use from the gossip column “Peeping Tom of Coventry,” which appeared in the underground London newspaper the Crim-Con Gazette of 18 May 1839. Crim-Con is short for criminal conversation, a legal euphemism for adultery, and the “peeping Tom” refers not to any voyeuristic activities of the people discussed in the column, but rather to the columnist themself, the conceit of the column being that they have spotted the illicit activity being described:

I SAW Enock Radman, the Omnibus Conductor, showing his unmentionables to little girls in Dulwich. Thinks I to myself, thinks I, You [sic] are a pretty fellow for a Conductor, and can’t conduct yourself in a better manner than that. You ought to be flogged at the cart’s tail.

So, unmentionables, while it certainly was used to refer to underwear, was widely used to refer to anything that was too distasteful, but not necessarily obscene, to be mentioned by name in polite society. And its use predated the Victorian era by nearly half a century. We often blame the Victorian era for prudery, and not without some justification, but prudery did not originate with Victoria, and it’s unfair to give a blanket assignment of all such attitudes to that era alone.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“Fifth and Morgan” (advertisement). St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat (Missouri), 5 December 1883, 12. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“A Grand Field-Day for the Fancy.” Morning Chronicle (London), 6 July 1825, 3. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

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

“Life in Windsor Park.” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 1 August 1824, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

“The Luddites.” Wright’s Leeds Intelligencer, 13 November 1815, 3. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

“Miseries of a Bachelor.” The Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album (Massachusetts), 23 December 1826, 405. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

“Mrs. Montague and the Breeches.” The Argus, 11 April 1791, 3. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2019, s.v. unmentionable, adj. and n.

“Peeping Tom of Coventry.” The Crim-Con Gazette, 39.2, 18 May 1839, 1. London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform, and the Victorian Underworld. Londonlowlife.amdigital.co.uk.

Sime, David, ed. “Song XC. The Golden Days We Now Possess.” The Edinburgh Musical Miscellany. Edinburgh: W. Gordon, et al. 1792, 210. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)

Image credit: Ralph Earl, 1789. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain image.