white / that's white of you

3 August 2021

The color white has long been associated with purity and goodness, and in the latter half of the nineteenth century a slang use of white began to be used to mean honest and gentlemanly. To be treated white was to be treated well and fairly. And by 1900, the phrase that’s white of you was in place to acknowledge such treatment. But along the way, these senses, especially the slang ones, acquired a racial connotation. Fair, honest, and gentlemanly treatment was white, as opposed the assumed behavior of people of color.

The use of white as a metaphor for purity and sinlessness in English dates to the Old English period. For example, there is this from one of Ælfric’s homilies, written in the closing years of the tenth century:

þæt gedafenað toforan eallum oþrum þingum þæt ælces mannes heorte beo wið ealle leahtras hwit & clæne, swaswa ge gewilnigeað þæt ge to ciercean becumen mid hwitum reafum & mid clænum

(That it is fitting above all other things that the heart of each man be white and clean of all sins, so that it both strives for it and comes to the church with white and clean garments.)

Of course, such early uses had no racial connotation. That would come later, but exactly when is debatable. But by the later Middle Ages, skin color began to be used as a metaphor for purity and goodness. For example, the romance The King of Tars (c.1330) has a Muslim sultan converting to Christianity and having his skin color change from black to white as a result. And the modern conception of race, based on skin color, came with the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a justification for the enslavement of Africans. It’s often difficult to determine if any particular usage was and is deliberately intended to be racist, or if it just reflected the racism that has been endemic throughout European and American society. But there is no doubt that by the nineteenth century, if not earlier, the association of the word white with racist ideas was widespread and deeply and inextricably embedded.

There is this from London’s Bell’s Weekly Messenger of 11 December 1836, which echoes Ælfric’s duality of white heart and white clothing:

Your conduct must vite there, my fine fellows—no blackguards admitted there; and not only must your conduct be vite, but your neck-handkerchief must vite too, on ball nights.

And in the United States, there is account from Timothy Cooley’s 1837 Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes:

There is a man of my acquaintance who feels that he owes much, under God, to the preaching of Mr. Haynes while at Torrington. He was disaffected that the church should employ him, and neglected meeting for a time. At length curiosity conquered prejudice so far that he went to the house of God. He took his seat in the crowded assembly, and, from designed disrespect, sat with his hat on. Mr. Haynes gave out his text, and began with his usual impassioned earnestness, as if unconscious of any thing amiss in the congregation. 'The preacher had not proceeded far in his sermon,' said the man, “before I thought him the whitest man I ever saw. My hat was instantly taken off and thrown under the seat, and I found myself listening with the most profound attention.”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the verb phrases to be white and to treat white in reference to persons started to appear. These formulations clearly express a racially stratified society where white people are socially superior to people of color. One of their earliest appearances is in a glossary of West Point cadet slang that accompanied the 1878 autobiography of Henry Ossian Flipper. Born into slavery, Flipper was the first Black graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Flipper gave no indication that the terms were overtly racist, but the fact that he included them in his autobiography is telling:

“To be white,” “To treat white.”—To be polite, courteous, and gentlemanly.

The verb phrases were not limited to West Point, as can be seen in an article in the National Police Gazette of 3 May 1890:

When the home had been turned inside out, the two robbers held a whispered conversation, and then turning to Bradrick asked: “Say, are you certain you have no more cash?” An affirmative response was received and one of the wretches said: “Lookey here pardner, we’re goin’ now, and if you squeal we’ll come back and do you up. We’ve treated you d—d white I think.” This opinion was too much even for the solemn occasion, and Bradrick could not repress a smile as he responded: “I am under many obligations for this courteous treatment. I should like to meet both of you again, but next time I would prefer you call at some more appropriate hour.”

And we seen a clearly racial use of the word white in the obituary of Peter Jackson, the Black championship boxer from Australia in the Sydney Sportsman of 17 July 1901:

He was black in skin, but a whiter man than Peter Jackson never lived.

And there is this passage form Chauncey M’Govern’s 1907 account of serving as an American soldier in the Philippines that expresses surprise that Filipinos could treat someone white:

Well, sir, they treated us white did them gu-gus in that pueblo. They didn't spare neither the rice or the fish and the cocoanut oil. They even boiled up half a dozen manuks for me and Clarke, and laid out the bottles of red beno as if it was as common as mud on the back of a carabao.

The phrase that’s white of you is recorded by 1900, although it is undoubtedly older. From David Dwight Wells’s 1900 His Lordship’s Leopard:

“I tell you what it is, Marchmont, that subeditorship is still vacant, and if you put this through, the place is yours.”

The reporter grasped his chiefs hand.

“That's white of you, boss,” he said, “and I'll do it no matter what it costs or who gets hurt in the process.”

And the next year, from Hamlin Garland’s Her Mountain Lover:

Hastings himself developed much admiration for the mountaineer. “You must let me see you in London,” he said several times. “I’ll put you down at my Club; and then, the governor will want to see you in the country.”

Jim had no idea of what was involved in being put down at a Club, but he consented. “That s mighty white of you, old man, but I don t know where I shall make down.”

Of course, there are many non-racist uses of white. But that cannot be said for phrases like to treat white or that’s white of you. Even if the speaker has no deliberate racist intent, such phrasings arise out of a racist context. Any use of white as metaphor for purity and goodness must be interrogated, and in many cases a better metaphor should be sought and used.

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Sources:

Brotanek, Rudolf, ed. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Altenenglischen Literatur und Kirchengeschichte. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913, 19. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Paris, Bibliothèque National MS lat 943, fol.165v–166r.

Cooley, Timothy Mather. Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837, 73. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Flipper, Henry Ossian. The Colored Cadet at West Point. New York: Homer Lee, 1878. Johnson Reprint, 1968, 54. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Footpads on Deck.” National Police Gazette, 3 May 1890, 6. ProQuest Magazines.

Garland, Hamlin. Her Mountain Lover. London: William Heinemann, 1901, 38. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. white, adv., white, adj.

M’Govern, Chauncey. By Bolo and Krag. Manila: Escolta Press, c.1907, 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2015, modified June 2021, s.v. white, adj. (and adv.) and n., white man, n.

“Peter Jackson ‘Outed.’” Sydney Sportsman, 17 July 1901, 1. Trove.

Wells, David Dwight. His Lordship’s Leopard. New York: Henry Holt, 1900, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Colorado

Map of the Colorado river basin as the river flows from the state of Colorado through Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California to the Gulf of California

2 August 2021

Indigenous peoples living in what is now the state of Colorado include the Arapaho, Apache, Cheyenne, Pueblo, Shoshone, Ute, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Navajo. Since the state of Colorado is a settler-colonist creation, there is, of course, no Indigenous name that corresponds to the region. But there are many Indigenous names for specific places in Colorado. One of the most prominent is Tavakiev (sun mountain), the Tabeguache name given to the mountain settler-colonists call Pike’s Peak. The Tabeguache are a band of the Northern Ute tribe. Tava is the Ute word for sun.

The name Colorado comes from the Spanish colorado (red). The Spanish word has referred to red since c.1300, but earlier, since at least 1215, it meant colored. It comes from the classical Latin coloratus (colored).

The state’s name comes from the name of the river, in Spanish Rio Colorado, so called because of the color of the sediment in the river. English adopted the Spanish name for the river, and it appears in English writing from at least 1721, where it can be found in Bernard and Collier’s appendix to Morery’s encyclopedic dictionary. The river’s name appears in the entry for California (i.e., what is now called Baja California, Mexico):

CALIFORNIA, a Peninsula in Northern America, upon the South Sea: It lies to the West of New Mexico, from whence ’tis parted only by the river Colorado.

What is now the state of Colorado was originally claimed by Spain. France acquired the eastern portion in 1802 and the next year sold it to the United States as part of the Louisiana purchase. The western portion passed from Spain to Mexico and was annexed by the United States in 1848 in the wake of the Mexican-American War. The Colorado Territory was organized in 1861, and in 1876 Colorado became the thirty-eighth state.

When it comes to U.S. territorial names, it is common to see a name applied to different areas prior to the formal organization of the territory, and such is the case with Colorado. We can see just such an early use in this article in the Massachusetts Ploughman of 24 August 1850. The area described an unofficial territory that included what is now Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico:

Colorado Territory, is that section of country bounded upon the lower west portion by the lower eastern boundary of California and the Colorado river, and the south by the dividing line between Mexico and the United States, on the East by the Sierra Madre, or Western limits of Mexico, and on the North by the curved ridge or 37th degree of latitude, which constitutes the southern boundary of Utah, until the line extends to the 42d degree of longitude, and is farther bounded North by the same.

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Sources:

Bernard, Jacques and Jeremy Collier. An Appendix to the Three English Volumes in Folio of Morery's Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary. London: George James, 1721. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, modified March 2019, s.v. Colorado, n.2; modified June 2021, s.v. colorado, n.1.

“The Territories of the U.S.” Massachusetts Ploughman (Boston), 24 August 1850, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Shannon1, 2018. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

tail wagging the dog / wag the dog

Actor E.A. Sothern as Lord Dundreary in the original 1858 cast of Our American Cousin. A monocled man with long, bushy sideburns and wearing a frock coat.

30 July 2021 (8 August: paragraph on the 1997 film Wag the Dog added)

The tail wagging the dog is a metaphorical expression for a minor part directing the actions of the whole. The metaphor is rather obvious, but unlike many such expressions, this one has a definitive origin. It comes from Tom Taylor’s play Our American Cousin, which was first performed in New York on 15 October 1858. The play was enormously popular in its day. So that it gave birth to a popular expression should be no surprise. But today the play is chiefly remembered for being the one that Abraham Lincoln was watching at Ford’s Theater when he was assassinated on 14 April 1865.

The relevant scene in the play goes as follows, a conversation between the characters of Lord Dundreary and Florence:

Dun     Well, I'll tell you—a draught. Now, I've got a better one than that: When is a dog's tail not a dog's tail? (FLORENCE repeats. During this FLORENCE, Mrs. M. and DUNDREARY are down stage.)

Dun      Yeth, that's a stunner. You've got to give that up.

Flo     Yes, and willingly.

Dun     When it's a cart. (They look at him enquiringly.[)]

Flo     Why, what on earth has a dog's tail to do with a cart?

Dun     When it moves about, you know. A horse makes a cart move, so does a dog make his tail move.

Flo     Oh, I see what you mean—when it's a wagon. (Wags the letter in her hand.[)]

Dun     Well, a wagon and a cart are the same thing, ain't they? That's the idea—it's the same thing.

Flo     They are not the same. In the case of your conundrum there's a very great difference.

Dun     Now I've got another. Why does a dog waggle his tail!

Flo     Upon my word, I never inquired.

Dun     Because the tail can't waggle the dog. Ha! ha!

The metaphorical expression, with waggle shortened to wag, appears in print within five years of the play’s premiere. From the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel of 15 August 1863:

It would be wrong to speak of its owner as a man with a nose, or of his face as having a nose to it. It was a nose with a face and a man attached to it. So far from the nose pertaining to the man—the man and all his specialties pertained to the nose.—The man followed the nose on the same principle that a dog wags his tail—because the dog is stronger than the tail, for if he were not the tail would wag the dog.

Another early use, from Burlington Vermont’s Free Press of 15 September 1866 obliquely references the play as the origin. The mention of Dundreary’s dog shows that the writer expected the readers to know the play:

The Reason Why.—“What makes you think,” asked a “conservative” of a Republican, “that the new party will still be controlled by the Democratic party, and that we shall be called upon to support Democratic nominations this fall?” “For the same reason,” was the reply, “that Dundreary’s dog wagged his tail—because the tail isn’t big enough to wag the dog!”—New Haven Palladium.

Early uses of the phrase are often in discussion of politics, as this one from New Orleans’s Daily Picayune of 19 July 1872 shows:

Though Mr. Darwin says this disappearance is forever, we fear he is mistaken. Certain signs are abroad that seem to indicate the danger of a caudal revival. The vague aspirations of the Dolly Varden girl of the period for reversing the decaudalization process, are followed by some ominous symptoms in a small and superfluous political denomination—a superfetation, so to speak, of a sickly and disjointed time—self-named the Liberal party[.] For practical purposes, this association of politicians can hope to be nothing save as an appendage to some other party. But, having heard of the ambitious tail that insisted on wagging the dog, it peremptorily demands to wag the Democratic and Reform combination in this State.

With this exception, the opposition elements are well organized on a footing of intelligent accord. The only obstacle is this little faction that madly dreams of fastening itself to the organization of Democrats and Reformers simply for the purpose of managing it. But the thing is against nature and against logical fitness. The tail can never wag the dog.

The phrase wag the dog got a boost in popularity from the 1997 film of that name (Barry Levinson, Director; David Mamet, Screenplay; starring Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, and Anne Heche) about a plan to fabricate a fictional war between the United States and Albania to cover up a presidential sex scandal. The film was released a month before the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal became public. The subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, alleged by the United States to be producing nerve agent for the terrorist group al-Qaeda, was believed by many to be just such a wag-the-dog operation.

It is perhaps fitting that the work that gave birth to the tail wagging the dog is chiefly remembered for an event it is associated with rather than for itself.

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Sources:

“About Tails.” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 19 July 1872, 4.

“City Matters. Milwaukee Daily Sentinel (Wisconsin), 15 August 1863, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

The Free Press (Burlington, Vermont), 15 September 1866, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

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

Taylor, Tom. Our American Cousin. 1869, 7–8. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image Credit: Jefferson, Joseph. The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889, 200–201. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Public domain image.

saunter

1907 photo of John Muir. An older, bearded man with a walking staff sitting on a boulder.

29 July 2021

In present-day usage, to saunter is to walk idly or leisurely, to stroll. The etymology is uncertain, but it most likely developed from the Middle English saunteren, meaning to wonder or muse, to be in a state of reverie. Over time, the meaning shifted from mental to physical wandering. The origin of the Middle English verb is unknown.

The word first appears as a gerund—that is verb form that functions as a noun—in the first half of the fifteenth century, where it means babbling, or talking meaninglessly or idly. We find it in two of the York mystery plays—the York plays are a cycle of biblical stories from creation to the Apocalypse, each play being staged by a different guild. One of these, the Crucifixion play, was performed by the guild of pinners, that is nail-makers. In the passages from this play, a group of four Roman soldiers are discussing Christ’s guilt prior to nailing him to the cross:

IV Miles:     I hope þat he hadde bene as goode
Have sesed of sawes þat he uppe-sought.

I Miles:     Thoo sawes schall rewe hym sore,
For all his saunteryng, sone.

(4th Soldier:    I believe he would have done well to have ceased the teachings that he invented.

1st Soldier:    For all his sauntering, those teachings he shall soon sorely regret.)

(The University of Michigan’s Middle English Dictionary (MED) defines this usage as “idle chatter, babbling.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in an entry from 1910, questions whether the appearances in the York play are the same word as the present-day saunter. The OED editors’ concern arises out of the notion that the idea of loitering or leisurely strolling doesn’t fit the context. But when one places it in the context of a transition from musing to babbling to walking without purpose, then it fits nicely. The OED goes on to suggest that the York plays may be verbing the noun sauntrell, which means a pretend or false saint. This suggestion fits the context, as well, but requires the invention of a verb that has no other citations of use. The OED entry is over a century old, and I suspect when it is updated for the third edition this commentary will be changed.)

The verb meaning to muse, to think idly appears by the late fifteenth century, where it can be found in the Romance of Partenay:

And when Gaffray, ualliant man and wurthy,
Had radde thys tablet, he moch meruelling;
But yut he knew noght uerray certainly,
But santred and doubted uerryly
Wher on was or no of this saide linage.

(And when Gaffrey, a valiant man and worthy, had read this tablet, he marvelled greatly; but yet he knew nothing for certain, but sauntered and doubted the truth of whether or not he was of this lineage.)

By the mid sixteenth century, the noun saunter is in place, but with the meaning of a charm or incantation. Here is a passage from William Turner’s book of herbology about the collection of seeds from a fern, in which he associates saunter with incantations used in witchcraft. But this is another case where the word, spelled saunters, may be a different word from the present-day saunter. The text in question is a translation of a Latin text, and the word being translated is preculis, meaning prayers or requests. It could refer to bogus incantations or meaningless words, or it might be an alteration of sanctus, the angelic hymn, a word taken from the opening words sanctus, sanctus, sanctus (holy, holy, holy). The text in question, which is about the seeds of ferns, or brakes, reads:

Manye brakes in some places had no sede at all / but in other places agayne: a man shall fynde sede in euerye brake / so that a man maye gather a hundred oute of one brake alone / but I went aboute this busynes / all figures / coniurynges / saunters / charmes / wytchcrafte / and sorseryes sett a syde / takynge wyth me two or three honest men to bere me co[m]panye / when I soughte this seede.

But by the mid seventeenth century, we see an unequivocal use of saunter in which the meaning has shifted from mental to physical wandering. From William Wycherley’s 1669 Hero and Leander in Burlesque:

In the mean time to th' May-pole, and the Green
She bid him go to see, and to be seen,
Or where he wou'd might saunter up and down,
And count the Signs, and fine things of the Town

And that is the sense that persists to the present day.

But saunter has a persistent false etymology that has dogged the word since the late seventeenth century. That is the idea that the word derives from the French sainte terre or holy land. According to the false etymology the French term was associated with medieval pilgrims to Palestine and gradually morphed into saunter. There is no evidence to support this etymology, and as we have seen, the physical wandering sense arises after the medieval era.

But early on, this etymology had the backing of most dictionaries. The first to plump for it was John Ray’s 1691 A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used, which defines it as:

To Santer about; or go Santering up and down. It is derived from Saincte terre, i.e. The Holy Land, because of old time when there were frequent Expeditions thither: many idle persons went from place to place, upon pretence that they had taken, or intended to take the Cross upon them, and to go thither. It signifies to idle up and down, to go loitering acount.

A few years later, the 1699 New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew has the following:

Saunter, to loiter idly, a Term borrowed from those Religious Counterfeits, who under the colour of Pilgrimages, to the Holy Land, us’d to get many Charities, crying still, Sainct Terre, Sainct terre, having nothing but the Holy Land in their Mouths, tho’s they stay’d alwaies at Home.

In 1721, in Nathan Bailey, in his Universal Etymological English Dictionary, cribs almost word for word from Ray’s earlier dictionary:

To SANTER [of Sancte Terre, F. or Sancta Terra, L. i.e., the Holy Land, because when there were frequent Expeditions to the Holy Land, many idle Persons went from Place to Place upon Pretence they had taken the Cross upon them, or intended to do so, and to go thither] to wander up and down.

And:

To SAUNTER [of sauter or sauteller, F. to dance, q.d. to dance to and fro, or of saincte terre, F.] to go idling up and down.

And Samuel Johnson’s great 1755 dictionary has:

aller à la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, and asked charity under pretence of going à la sainte terre, to the holy land; or sans terre, as having no settled home.

We can forgive these early lexicographers for believing this etymology. It sounds plausible on its face, and they did not have resources to investigate that we do today. No serious lexicographer takes this etymology seriously nowadays, but it persists in the popular imagination. The persistence to the present day is largely due to two famous writers who plumped for it, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.

In his essay Walking, posthumously published in the June 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Thoreau wrote:

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that tis, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer,—a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

The false etymology is not recorded in Muir’s writing, but a 1911 account by Albert Palmer has him advocating for it:

One day as I was resting in the shade Mr. Muir overtook me on the trail and began to chat in that friendly way in which he delights to talk with everyone he meets. I said to him: “Mr. Muir, someone told me you did not approve of the word 'hike,' is that so?” His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied: “I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains—not ‘hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre,' 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike' through them." And John Muir lived up to his doctrine. He was usually the last man to reach camp. He never hurried. He stopped to get acquainted with individual trees along the way, he would hail people passing by and make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to examine some tiny seedling or to see the beauty of some little bed of almost microscopic flowers.

The Muir quote, in particular, can be found in memes throughout the internet, although it is unlikely that the words Palmer puts in Muir’s mouth were his exact words. The account appears sometime after the encounter, and one doubts that at the time Palmer was writing down what Muir was saying. Still, the gist of Muir’s point, including the etymology, is probably accurately recorded. It also seems likely that Muir was familiar with Thoreau’s essay, and that is probably the source of his belief.

Like the early lexicographers, we can forgive Thoreau’s and Muir’s mistake. By the sources of their day, they would not have been wrong. But we know better today. And while the Thoreau’s and Muir’s tales are charming and perhaps even poetic, that does not make them correct.

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Sources:

Bailey, Nathan. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary. London: E. Bell, et al., 1721. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“John Muir and ‘SAUNTER.’” Online Etymological Dictionary, 26 October 2019.  

Johnson, Samuel. Johnson’s Dictionary Online (1755). s.v. saunter, v.n.

Lancashire, Ian, ed. Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME), accessed 9 July 2021.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. saunteren, v., sauntering, ger.

A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, 1699, 1. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Palmer, Albert W. The Mountain Trail and Its Message. Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1911, 27–28. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Ray, John. A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used. London: Christopher Wilkinson, 1691, 111. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Skeat, Walter W., ed. The Romans of Partenay. Revised ed. Early English Text Society, OS 22. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899, lines 4650–54, 161. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.17.

Thoreau, Henry D. “Walking.” The Atlantic Monthly, 9.56, June 1862, 657. ProQuest Magazines.

Turner, William. The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal of William Turner, second part. Cologne: Arnold Birckman, 1568, 3r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Walker, Greg. “York (The Pinners), The Crucifixion.” Medieval Drama: An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000, lines 66–70, 135. London, British Library, MS Additional 35290.

Wycherley, William. Hero and Leander in Burlesque. London: 1669, 57. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Francis M. Fritz, 1907. Public domain image.

rabbit test / the rabbit died

Poster for the 1978 film Rabbit Test, written and directed by Joan Rivers (subject of an early use of the phrase the rabbit died) and starring Billy Crystal. The poster has the image of a pregnant man (Crystal) with a woman (Rivers) pointing quizzically at his extended abdomen.

28 July 2021

You don’t hear rabbit test or the rabbit died much anymore, but if you watch old movies or television shows, you might hear the phrase the rabbit died. Simply, a rabbit test is any test that uses a rabbit as a subject animal, and more specifically it refers to a pregnancy test. The phrase the rabbit died is a slang expression meaning a positive result on a pregnancy test.

The use of rabbit test to mean a lab test using a rabbit dates to at least 1908, when it appears in and article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in reference to a test for specific bacteria that cause putrefaction in tissue:

In ten cases where the reactions were positive, the rabbit test was made and in every instance but one (which probably failed on account of faulty manipulation) the striking phenomenon of gaseous distension of the animal was obtained.

The practice of using rabbits to test for pregnancy-related hormones in human urine was pioneered in 1931 by Maurice Friedman and Maxwell Lapham at the University of Pennsylvania. The application of rabbit test to refer specifically to a pregnancy test quickly followed. A succinct, if technical, description of the test can be found in the October 1931 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology:

In describing our results with the rabbit ovulation test for pregnancy it will not be necessary to discuss the biologic basis upon which it rests, since the reader will find the subject well covered in a recent review by Aschheim (1930) dealing with the Aschheim-Zondek test, and in another by Friedman upon the rabbit test, of which he is the original proponent. It will suffice to say that the urine of pregnant human females, after about the third week, contains large quantities of substances resembling in their effects the gonad-stimulating hormones of the anterior lobe of the hypophysis. The Aschheim-Zondek test and the rabbit ovulation test are simply two different methods for obtaining evidence as to the presence or absence of the hormones in question, in a. given sample of urine. The former is performed by giving daily injections of the urine in question to immature mice; at autopsy after five days the ovaries are examined directly for signs of stimulated growth and function. The rabbit test of Friedman depends upon the fact, that rabbits, which (unlike most other mammals) do not normally mature and rupture their graafian follicles except after copulation, may be made to ovulate without copulation by giving them an intravenous injection of the gonad-stimulating hormones as found in the hypophysis and in the pregnant urine.

The phrase the rabbit died comes along much later and is based on a misconception that if the rabbit died, the pregnancy test was positive. In reality, the rabbit died either way, because the test required a necropsy to examine the animal’s ovaries. The earliest example of the slang phrase that I have found is from a syndicated gossip column of 3 July 1967 that discusses comedian Joan Rivers’s pregnancy:

JOAN RIVERS PLANS rolling right along comically until next Christmas or so th’ the baby’s due in Feb....Joan’s whole gag-bin has shifted since the rabbit died...Says her husband Edgar was a bachelor so long, when she informed him she was expecting he took the classical bachelor-attitude and shrugged, “Don’s look at me.”

The rabbit test for pregnancy is no longer performed. Present-day pregnancy tests, such as those which can be purchased over the counter at a pharmacy, operate on the same principle, testing for certain hormones, but the test is performed without using an animal, a much more humane process.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. rabbit, n.1.

O’Brian, Jack. “Jack O’Brian’s Voice of Broadway.” Jersey Journal (Jersey City, New Jersey), 3 July 1967, 18. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008 (updated June 2021), s.v. rabbit, n.1.

Rettger, Leo F. “Further Studies of Putrefaction.” Journal of Biological Chemistry, 4.1, 1908, 54. Elsevier Science Direct.

Wilson, Karl M. and George W. Corner. “The Results of the Rabbit Ovulation Test in the Diagnosis of Pregnancy.” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 22.4, October 1931, 513. Elsevier Science Direct.

Image credit: AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1978. Fair use of a low-resolution image of a copyrighted word to illustrate the topic under discussion.