hashish / assassin

August 25, 2021

Pieces of hashish, with a U.S. penny for scale

25 August 2021

Hashish is cannabis resin, which is smoked as a recreational drug. The word comes from the Arabic حشيش‎ or ḥašīš, but it took three distinct etymological paths in making its way into English. The earliest appearances of the word in English are in the form assis, which was a borrowing from sixteenth-century Dutch. (The word in present-day Dutch is hasj.) Also making an early appearance in English is the form lhasis, which is a borrowing from post-classical Latin, which in turn comes the Arabic al-ḥašīš (the hashish). The modern spelling hashish is either a direct borrowing from Arabic or from one of the many European languages that borrowed it from that language.

The earliest known appearance of the hashish in English is in a translation from Dutch in the form assis. From Jan Huygens van Linschoten’s 1598 Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies:

Bangue is likewise much vsed in Turkie and Aegypt, and is made in three sorts, hauing also three seuerall names The first by the Aegyptians is called Assis, which is the poulder of Hemp, or of Hemp leaues, which water made in paste or dough, wherof they eate fiue peeces, each as bigge as a Chesnut and some more, such as eate it, for an hower after, are as if they were drunke, without sence, and as it were besides themselues, thinking they see many strange sights, wherein they are much pleased. This is vsed by the common people, because it is of a small price, and it is no wonder, that such vertue proceedeth from the Hempe, for that according to Galens opinion, Hempe excessiuely filleth the head.

The original Dutch reads, “Het eerste noemen die Ægyptenaren Assis.”

The lhasis form appears in English in a 1600 translation of John Leo’s Latin A Geographical Historie of Africa:

Most part of their substance and labour they bestow vpon perfumes and other such vanities. They haue here a compound called Lhasis, whereof whosoeuer eateth but one ounce falleth a laughing, disporting, and dallying, as if he were halfe drunken; and is by the said confection maruellously prouoked vnto lust.

Leo’s Latin uses the word Lhasis.

The modern form also first appears in a translation, this time from the German Haschisch. From a 1792 translation of Carsten Niebuhr’s Travels Through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East in a passage about North Africa:

The lower people are fond of raising their spirits to a state of intoxication. As they have no strong drink, they, for this purpose, smoke Haschisch, which is the dried leaves of a sort of hemp. This smoke exalts their courage, and throws them into a state in which delightful visions dance before the imagination. One of our Arabian servants, after smoking Haschisch, met with four soldiers in the street, and attacked the whole party. One of the soldiers gave him a sound beating, and brought him home to us. Notwithstanding his mishap, he would not make himself easy, but still imagined, such was the effect of his intoxication, that he was match for any four men.

The English word assassin is a bit odd, because while it ultimately comes from the word hashish, the word for the murderer appears in English several centuries before the word for the drug. English gets assassin from the Old French hassasis, which in turn is from the Arabic ḥašīšī, originally a derogatory name for the Nizari sect of the Ismaili Muslims, a branch of Shiism. The slur was the medieval equivalent of calling a group “a bunch of drug addicts.” In Arabic, the slur was associated with low social class or poor morals. It was in European stories brought back by Crusaders that first made the claim that the blind obedience of killers to their leader was facilitated by the drug.

The association with killing arises out of a twelfth-century folk tale, which has members of the sect getting high on hashish, a foretaste of what awaited them in paradise, and then conducting murders-for-hire at the behest of the leader, the “old man of the mountain,” that is Rashid al-Din Sinan, a leader of the Nizari in what is now Syria. In European versions of the tale, the victims of these assassins were often Christians. While the Nizari in the twelfth century did use assassination as a political tool, as did many other groups including the Crusaders themselves, the bit about doped-up killers is fiction.

Assassin first appears in English with the sense of a member of the Nizari sect, particularly one who killed at the behest of their leader. From the 1340 Ayenbite of Inwyt:

Þe milde bouȝþ gledliche uor he is ase þe hassasis. þet ys bliþe huanne he heþ þe heste onderuonge of his maistre. þet þe perils and þe pinen an þane dyaþ he onderuangþ þerwyþ mid to greate blisse uor þe loue þet he heþ to þe obedience.
(The humble person gladly bows because his is like the assassins, that is happy when he is under the command of his master, that he undertakes therewith the perils and pains of that death with too great bliss because of the love that he has for obedience.)

By the early sixteenth century, assassin was being used generally to mean a person who murders for hire, pointing out that at the time there was no English law against assassination per se, only for murder in general, and that intent to commit murder or assassination was not a crime, only the act itself. From Christopher Saint German’s 1531 Second Dialogue Between Doctor and Student:

Doctoure. yt appereth in the sayde summe called summa Angelica in the .xxi. chapytre. in the tytle of Ascismus the .2.Paragraf. that he is an ascismus that wyll slee men for money at the instaunce of euery man that wyll moue hym to yt, & such a man may laufully be slayne not only by the Juge but by euery pryuate persone. But it is sayd there in the .4.Paragraf. that he must fyrst be Juged by the lawe as an asismus [e]r he may be slayne or his goodes seased. And it is sayde ferther there in the .2.Paragraf that also in conseyence suche an ascismus may be slayne yf yt be done thrugh a ʒele of Justyce and els not. Is not the lawe of the realme lykewyse of men outlawed/abiured/ or Juged for felony.
Student. In the lawe of the realme there is no suche law that a man shall be adiuged as an ascinmus / ne yf a man be in full purpose for a certayne summe of money that he hath receyued to slee a man: yet yt is no felony ne murdre in the law in the law tyll he hathe done the acte for the intent in felony nor murdre is not punyssshable by the comon lawe of the realme though it be dedly synne afre god

And the figurative use of assassin, as in character assassin, appears by the early seventeenth century. From a 1609 sermon preached by William Symonds:

The onely perill is in offending God, and taking of Papists in to your company: if once they come creeping into your houses, then looke for mischiefe: if treason or poyson bee of any force: know them all to be very Assasines, of all men to be abhorred

So, while the words hashish and assassin are etymologically related, the notion that the original assassins were inspired to commit the act by the drug is false, an example of a medieval Islamophobic slur.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Daftary, Farhad. “Assassins.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, third edition. Brill: 2007.

Gradon, Pamela. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt or Remorse of Conscience (1866), vol. 1.Early English Text Society, O.S. 23. London: Oxford UP, 1965, 140. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Arundel MS 57.

Leo, John. A Geographical Historie of Africa. John Pory, trans. London: George Bishop, 1600, 249. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Linschoten, Jan Huygen van. His Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies. London: John Wolfe, 1598, 125. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Niebuhr, Carsten. Travels Through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East, vol. 2 of 2. Robert Heron, trans. Edinburgh: R. Morison and Son, et. al., 1792, 225. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2018, modified December 2020, s.v. hashish, n.

Saint German, Christopher. The Secunde Dyalogue in Englysshe wyth New Addycyons. London: Peter Treueris, 1531, fol. 104v. Early English Books Online (EEBO). (The digital scan here is difficult to read in places. I used the next source, which is a better scan, albeit with a slightly more modernized spelling, as a crib for transcribing this one.)

———. “Second Dialogue.” Two Dialogues in English Between A Doctour of Divinity and a Student in the Laws of England. London: John Streater, et al. 1688. 275–76. Wiley Digital Archives.

Symonds, William. Virginia. A Sermon Preached at White-Chappel, in the Presence of Many, Honourable and Worshipfull, the Aduenturers and Planters for Virginia. 25.April.1609. London: I. Windet for Eleazar Edgar and William Welby, 1609, 45–46. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, a.2005. Public domain image.

Windy City

August 24, 2021

The Chicago skyline seen from Lake Michigan. A city of tall buildings, foregrounded by a park-lined lakefront shore with sailboats moored along it.

24 August 2021

Chicago is known as the Windy City, but where does this nickname come from? Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. The nickname is a reference to the winds off Lake Michigan, with perhaps a bit of a double entendre referencing Chicago’s self-promotion as a bunch of hot air.

Many cities and towns have been labeled the Windy City over the years, and there are even more simple co-locations of the two words, windy and city, that do not constitute an idiom. For instance, in the 1850s and 60s, it was fashionable to label San Francisco as the windy city. There is this letter from the pseudonymous T.J. Sluice-Fork dated 14 July 1856 that was published a week later in San Francisco’s Golden Era:

Having told you a thing or two about Columbia, you must allow me to inquire about matters and things in the bay city. What are you doing there in the matter of reform? I see by other papers that your Committee have sent another batch of rogues to—the Atlantic states, or out of California, at any rate, and that they are smelling around after more. The great question with me is, how many rogues did you have down in the windy city in the first place, and how will your population foot up when the ballot box stuffers and rascals in general are all driven away?

And there is this item in Manchester, New Hampshire’s Dollar Weekly Mirror of 13 February 1858 that applies the term to that city:

Samuel Webber, Esq., formerly of this city, is about to establish himself at Manchester, N.H. He passed through this city on Tuesday, on his way to the windy city. He ought to find employment here. — Lawrence Courier.
It is the editor’s high living while he is here that makes him think this is a “windy” city.

But it is Chicago that most famously bears the sobriquet. The earliest reference to Chicago as the Windy City that I know of appears in the Chicago Daily Tribune of 7 April 1858. I give the article in full because not only does it show the purple prose and satirical exaggeration that was common in nineteenth-century American newspapers, but it also shows the violent antipathy that many Americans of the era had for Mormons:

The valorous young gentlemen of Chicago who have been burning with soldierly zeal to shoot, impale, transfix, or otherwise put to death a battalion, or if need be, a whole city of Mormons, but bottle up their ire, and keep it hot for some other occasion. Their dreams of rushing into Mormon harems, amid the horrors of an assault, and rescuing therefrom the imprisoned beauties in danger of death from bursting bombs or red hot cannon shot, all go for naught. Their visions of a “gel-o-rious campaign,” of scenes of high conviviality in camp, of hair’s breadth ’scapes in the field, of shining political rewards upon their return, of future histories in which their names would appear within halos of glory, shining out from the forum and field, were only mockeries. They can’t go! Their patriotic offerings are not accepted. The President, though each were a Curtius, will have none of them. He has taken a regiment of seedy rag-a-muffins from New York, another from Pennsylvania, and the third must come from the South. Oh, sad fate! A thousand embryo conquerors, doomed to die without chipping their shells or uttering a single peep! An hundred militia officers, from corporal to commander, condemned to air their vanity and feathers only for the delectation of the boys and servant girls in this windy city.

The Buffalo Express has a pair of uses of Windy City in reference to Chicago in November 1867. From the 11 November issue:

According to the mood which they happen to be in, depending upon the state of self intoxication prevailing at the moment, the Chicagonese claim anywhere from 250,000 to a million population. But some way, it contrives always to be the fact that the windy city, when it holds an election, shows a wonderful scarcity of voters, compared with the aggregate number of souls which it pretends to have in its keeping.

And there is this headline from the paper’s 30 November 1867 issue:

WESTON.
His Arrival and Reception at Chicago.
The Windy City in a State of Excitement.
Incidents of the Pedestrian’s Final March!
&c. &c. &c.

And this from the Cincinnati Daily Gazette of 9 August 1869:

A great many citizens have left for Chicago, during the past few days, to take a look at the windy city.

Word sleuth Barry Popik has found numerous examples of Windy City, referring to Chicago, emanating out of Cincinnati in the 1860s and 70s, and that seems to be where the term became popular and established. The nickname for the city has stuck for over 160 years.

There is a particularly common, but false, legend about the origin of the name that began to appear in the 1930s and persists to this day, often repeated by what should be quite respectful sources. The legend has it that the nickname was coined by Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun in the early 1890s. At the time, Chicago and New York were competing to host the 1893 Columbian Exposition, in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus discovering America. Dana allegedly used the term to describe the overblown claims of Chicago.

It’s a great story. It evokes the rivalry between two great cities. It involves journalists, making it irresistible for newspapers to repeat without verification (for journalists love nothing better than to talk about themselves and their profession). But, unfortunately, it’s not true. There is no record of Dana ever using the nickname, and even if he had, we have seen that it was in common use long before the 1890s.

Also, there are those who criticize the nickname because Chicago is not the windiest city. Wellington, New Zealand tops most windiest-cities lists. For the U.S., Dodge City, Kansas is at the top of a lot of the lists (there’s a lot of variability in the sources, probably due to the time period of the measurements). But that’s not fair. Chicago is objectively pretty windy, and it’s a lot bigger than most of the other cities on those lists.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Bierma, Nathan. “Windy City: Where Did It Come From?” Chicago Tribune, 7 December 2004, B1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

The Buffalo Express (Buffalo, New York), 11 November 1867, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

———, 30 November 1867, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Dayton Items.” Cincinnati Daily Gazette (Ohio), 9 August 1869, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dollar Weekly Mirror (Manchester, New Hampshire), 13 February 1858, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. Windy City, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, second edition, s.v. windy, adj.1.

Sluice-Fork, T.J. “Letter from “Sluice-Fork” (14 July 1856). The Golden Era (San Francisco), 20 July 1856, 8. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Would-Be Army of Utah.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 April 1858, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Chris Taylor, 2009. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Hawai'i

August 23, 2021

23 August 2021

The origin of Hawaiʻi, the name of the fiftieth state of the United States and of the “Big Island” in that archipelago, is rather obviously from the Hawaiian language, a Polynesian dialect. The name originally applied only to the one island, only later becoming a name for the entire island chain. Cognates of Hawaiʻi can be found as placenames throughout Polynesia, e.g., Havaiki in New Zealand and the North Marquesas, ʻAvaiki in the Cook Islands, and Saviʻi in Samoa. In these dialects the name means either homeland or is the name of the place of the dead, the underworld, but it does not have these associations in the Hawaiian dialect, where it is simply a place name with no additional meaning attached to it.

As a general rule, indigenous toponyms give way to settler-colonist ones, but Hawaiʻi is an exception. The name assigned by Captain James Cook when he became the first European to document a visit to the islands in 1778 was the Sandwich Islands, after John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, then the first lord of the British admiralty. But that name is all but forgotten today.

Meme of Homer Simpson with the words, “MMM Sandwich.”

Cook actually named two places the Sandwich Island(s). The first was an island in what is now French Polynesia he visited on his second voyage to the Pacific. In a journal entry dated 31 August 1774, Cook notes the positions of:

Aurora, Whitsuntide, Ambryn, Paoom, and its neighbour Apee, Threehills, and Sandwich Islands, lie all nearly under the meridian of 167° 29ʹ or 30ʹ East, extending from the latitude of 14° 51ʹ 30″, to 17° 53ʹ 30″.

The second place was Hawaiʻi, which he dubbed the Sandwich Islands in 1778. Cook would be killed there the following year, but the name is recorded in the astronomical and navigational observations from the voyage, posthumously published in 1782:

In the passage from Sandwich Islands to Kamtschatka, the pendulum spring of the clock No. 1, in the care of Lieutenant King, became rusty and broke, which rendered it in a manner useless during the remaining part of the voyage.

That same source also records one of the earliest appearances of the name Hawai’i in English writing, spelled Oeyhee in a table that gives the latitude and longitude of the Big Island.

The spelling Hawaiʻi started appearing in English in the 1820s. As rule, European settler-colonists were not good about recording Indigenous words or languages, but one exception has been Christian missionaries. Bringing the gospel to Indigenous peoples required learning Indigenous languages, and often what we know of these languages comes from missionary sources. Of course, those missionaries had their own self-serving reasons for doing so, and the result of their efforts was the destruction of Indigenous language and culture, but in the process they did leave a record of Indigenous language that has proven useful in understanding, reconstructing, and revitalizing those languages in more recent decades. A letter dated 1 October 1822 from Elisha Loomis, a missionary in Hawaiʻi, gives some details of the Hawaiian language and the new transliteration system for it:

Before closing, I will say something respecting the spelling-book and pronunciation of this language. By the first sheet of the Hawaiian spelling book, you will see the manner in which the vowels are to be sounded. Thus a, is pronounced as a in father, &c. We shall hereafter spell the proper names without regard to the former orthoraphy [sic], as that in most cases is incorrect. I send you a list of some words as they have formerly been spelt, and as we shall spell them hereafter. It is a singular fact, that there is no instance in the language where a consonant ends a word or syllable. The t and k, are used indiscriminately, as are also the r and l, and in some cases, the n, r and l. Thus, the word for fly, or insect, may be pronounced by one Ná-ro, by another Ná-lo, and by another Ná-no. The v and w, are also sometimes used in the same manner. The following is the orthography which we shall adopt of some of the proper names:
     Ha-wái-i,          Owhyhee
     Maú-i,              Mowee
     Oá-hu              Woahoo

The islands were politically united under King Kamehameha by 1810. The monarchy was overthrown in 1893, and the islands were annexed by the United States in 1898. Hawaiʻi became the fiftieth state in 1959.

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Sources:

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

Cook, James. A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, vol. 2 of 2. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777, 98. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Cooke, James, James King, and William Bayly. The Original Astronomical Observations Made in the Course of a Voyage to the Northern Pacific Ocean. London: William Richardson, 1782, 69n, 320. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

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

Loomis, Elisha. “Oahee, October 1, 1822.” Utica Christian Repository, 2.3, 1 March 1823, 90. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Pukui, Mary Kawena and Samuel H. Elbert. Hawaiian Dictionary, revised and enlarged edition. Honolulu: U of Hawaii Press, 1986, 62. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Pukui, Mary Kawena, Samuel H. Elbert, and Esther T. Mookini. Place Names of Hawaii, revised and enlarged edition. 43. Honolulu: UP of Hawaii, 1974. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credits: Frank Davey, 1898. Hawai’i State Archives. Public domain image. “MMM Sandwich.” Memegenerator.net. Accessed 10 August 2021. Based on a character created by Matt Groening, Gracie Films, 20th Television.

widow / widow's peak / peak / pike

August 20, 2021

1650 Painting of Olimpia Maidalchini in widow’s clothes by Diego Velázquez. Maidalchini was the sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X and reputed to have had significant influence over papal appointments and decisions. Portrait of a middle-aged woman clothed in black and with a widow’s cap that forms a peak on her forehead.

20 August 2021

A widow’s peak is a triangular point of hair in the middle of a person’s forehead. There was once a folk belief that such a peak of hair was a sign of early widowhood, and long before the word peak became associated with mountains, it simply meant a point. In present-day use, widow’s peak is not limited to widows or even to women. Men can have widow’s peaks too.

Before we get to the full phrase widow’s peak, let’s take a look at its component words

The word widow is inherited from Proto-Germanic and has cognates in many Germanic languages. Its Old English predecessor is widuwe. The Old English noun is feminine, but there was also a rarer masculine form corresponding to the Present-Day widower. The usual association of widowhood with women, and the fact that widow is the unmarked (i.e., basic) form while widower is marked (i.e., differentiated), is a result of patriarchal societies typically classifying women based on their relationship with men, while not doing so with men.

An example of the Old English widuwe can be found in a homily by Ælfric of Eynsham, De Duodecim Abusivis (Regarding the Twelve Abuses) in a passage about the proper role of just king:

He sceal beon bewerigend wydewena and steopbearna, and stala alecgan, and forliger gewitnian, and þa arleasan adræfan of his earde mid ealle, wiccecræft alecgan and wigelunga ne gyman.
(He must be a defender of widows & stepchildren & put an end to theft & punish adultery & banish wicked ones from his land and at the same time abolish all witchcraft and pay no heed to soothsaying.)

Peak, the other half of widow’s peak, is a fifteenth-century variation on pike, which originally meant point—the weapon takes its name from its stabbing point. Pike has cognates in many Germanic languages, but a similar word is also found in many Romance languages, e.g. French pic. Classical Latin has picus (woodpecker), and the Germanic and Romance words probably were interchanged and reinforced one another multiple times through the centuries. So, peak’s origin seems to be a combination of Romance and Germanic roots.

We can see an Old English use of pic in a translation of Bili’s life of St. Machutus (or St. Malo):

Se halga machu wæs þa ingangende on þæs dracan scræfe, & his stæfes pic on þon scræfe gesette.
(The holy Machutus was then visiting in this dragon’s cave, & set his staff’s pike [i.e., point] in the cave.)

Bili’s Latin reads cuspidem baculi sui.

Pike or peak could be applied to all sorts of pointed objects, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century it was being used to refer to the point on the front of a headdress or widow’s hood. In his 1509 translation of Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools, Alexander Barclay uses the word this way in a passage commenting on new fashions in clothing:

And ye Jentyl wymen whome this lewde vice doth blynde
Lased on the backe: your peakes set a loft.
Come to my Shyp. forget ye nat behynde.
Your Sadel on the tayle: if you lyst to sit soft.
Do on your Deck Slut: if ye purpos to come oft.
I mean your Copyntanke: And if it wyl do no goode.
To kepe you from the rayne. ye shall haue a foles hoode.
(And you gentle women whom this lewd vice does blinde
Laced in the back, your peaks set aloft.
Come to my ship, do not leave behind
Your saddle on the tail, if you desire to sit softly.
Put on your covering, slut, if you aim to come often.
I mean your high-crowned hat, and if it will do no good
To keep you from the rain, you shall have a fool’s hood.)

From the style of pointed headcovering often worn by widows, peak came to refer to the point of hair on some people’s foreheads. And by the 1680s, the phrase widow’s peak was in use. From a museum catalog’s description of a shell, where writer Nehemiah Grew uses the phrase to describe various objects in the collection:

The MAILED SAILER. Nauticlus Laminatus. I meet with it no where. Both within, and especially without, of the colour of the richest Pearl. It is composed of a considerable number of Plates, as if in Armor. Yet the Plates continuous; furrow'd along the middle, and produced with a blunt Angle, almost like a Widows-Peak. From under each of which, emergeth a kind of little Tongue, like that of a Shoo-Buckle.

And from a description of a Native-American article of clothing:

An APRON for the Pudenda of a Woman. A 1/4 of a yard deep, and shaped like a Widows Peak. Hath two transverse Labels, with several small Tassel'd Strings, to tie it about her middle; and a great one hanging down before. Made of Rushes, and other Plants.

Since then, widow’s peak has lost the cultural association with widowhood, but the phrase remains in fossilized form.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Ælfric. “De Duodecim Abusivis.” in Mary Clayton, ed. Two Ælfric Texts: The Twelve Abuses and the Vices and Virtues. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013, 129. JSTOR. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton MS 115.

Barclay, Alexander, trans. The Ship of Fools (1509), vol. 1. Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1874, 38. Google Books.

Grew, Nehemiah. Musæum Regalis Societatis: or, a Catalogue and Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham College. London: Thomas Malthus, 1685, 137, 374. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, modified June 2021, s.v. widow, n.; September 2005, modified June 2021, peak, n.2 and adj.; March 2006, modified June 2021, pike, n.1.

Yerkes, David, ed. The Old English Life of Machutus. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1984, 41. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Painting by Diego Velázquez, 1650. Unknown photographer. Photograph is in the public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work in the public domain.

shebang / the whole shebang / shebeen

August 19, 2021

A shebeen in Namibia. A rough, cinder-block building with an open door, a sign reading “If Not Why Not,” a sign offering internet access, and a plastic chair sitting outside.

19 August 2021

The phrase the whole shebang means the entirety of something. It is akin to the whole nine yards and the whole kit and caboodle. The phrase appears in the years following the American Civil War, during which shebang had become established in soldier slang as a tent or rough dwelling.

Where shebang comes from is uncertain, but it most likely comes from shebeen, or in the original Irish síbín, a slang term for illicit liquor or an unlicensed establishment selling such liquor. The -ín is a diminutive ending, but the meaning of the síb root is unknown. If true, the word went from meaning illicit liquor to a place where illicit liquor was sold, and then on to a rude or makeshift dwelling like such a place, and finally in the phrase meaning the entirety, akin to and the kitchen sink.

Shebeen appears in English by 1743 in the sense of illicit liquor, when it is mentioned in a trial in Ireland involving Richard Annesley, Sixth Earl of Anglesey. A portion of the transcript from 16 November 1643 reads:

Q. What Goods were they that were taken away?
A. A Feather Bed, the Coop, some Casks, and my Lord’s Buckles that he had in his Shoes.
Q. Are you sure you had seen those Goods in my Lord’s House?
A. I can’t say so, but to be sure they were so.
Q. Where were they found?
A. At Bally Hobbart.
Q. In whole House?
A. In her Brother’s. And there were some more of them got at another Place just by Bally Hobbart. My Lord’s Buckles were taken out of her Brother’s Shoes.
Q. What Office was you in then?
A. I was High Constable at that Time.
Q. What did Joan Laffen do at this Time?
A. One while she used to sell Shebeen.
Q. You don’t mean that you saw these Goods in actual Possession of Joan Laffen?
A. No, no; but she liv’d in the House with her Brother at that Time.

Another account of that same exchange reads:

Being asked what Reason he has to believe that Joan Laffan is not a Person to be believ’d upon her Oath; says, she is a Woman of ill Fame that keeps a Shebeen-house, and led an ill Life.

A marginal note here glosses Shebeen-house as “little Ale-[hou]se.” (The digital scan is partially illegible, but the illegible letters can be discerned from context.)

The sense of shebeen referring to a tavern or pub appears by 1749 in a question posed to the mayor of the city of Limerick in regard to a controversy over weights and measures:

Whether the Mayor, who by his Oath of Office, is Sworn Clerk of the Markets, is not in Conscience bound to Visit them frequently, and not to trust any low indigent Man to that Work, whose Exigencies might tempt him to send a Piece of Meat to his own Kitchen, rather than to the Goals? Whether the Shebeen or market Measure that at present used, is not made in such a Form as to Scoop up three times the Toll? and whether the Mayor does not, or ought not to know this?

Shebeen is again associated with the Earl of Anglesey, or more accurately his estate, in yet another trial, this one from 1766, in which his three daughters from his first marriage sued his estate:

Hitherto the said Earl Richard had always lived in great Harmony with his said Wife, and took great Care of the Education of his three Daughters by her; but having soon after, in her Absence, contracted a Familiarity, and criminal Intercourse with one Gillin alias Julian Donovan, the Daughter of one Richard Donovan, who sold an unlicensed Kind of Ale, called Shebeen, in a cabin, in the Village of Camolin, where his Lordship’s Men Servants usually frequented, often at very untimely Hours, and sometimes stayed out of the Family whole Nights, for the sake of the said Gillin’s Company.

A 1773 essay describes the destructive nature of shebeen:

Here it cannot but be taken notice of how much it were to be wished, that the brewers of malt liquors in Ireland would mend their hands by brewing good drink, and not contribute so largely to the impoverishment of the kingdom, by causing so considerable a drain of cash to be sent away for porter, thereby obliging the wealthier part of the people to drink foreign liquors, another part to drink burning spirits, destructive to the human species and productive of all sorts of enormities and miseries seen in the objects who fill the jails and hospitals, or stupified and diseased with drinking foggy ale and shebeen of bad ingredients, and as bad manufacture.

A 1780 travelogue by John Talbot Dillon compares the local Spanish booze to shebeen:

In both countries the common people are passionate, easily provoked if their family is slighted, or their descent called in question. The Chacoli of Biscay, or the Shebeen of Ireland, makes them equally frantic.

And a 1788 summary of Irish law details what happens when the authorities break up an illicit tavern:

V. sect. 28. Ale called shebeen, seized for any offence against any revenue laws, shall be sold at any time after seizure; and if claimed by owner and adjudged not subject to seizure, claimant shall be paid so much money, as produce from such ale amounted to, provided proper permit produced for the malt, of which made.

And a marginal note summarizes the summary:

Shebeen ale, if seized, may be sold, if claimed, and not subject to seizure, produce paid, on permit for the malt.

Finally, before we leave shebeen and move to shebang, there is this 1789 slang-filled ditty, “Luke Caffrey’s Kilmainham Minit,” about partying with a dead man:

Pads foremost he div’d, and den round
He caper’d de Kilmainham Minit;
But soon, when he lay on the Ground,
Our bisiness we taut to begin id:
Wid de Stiff to a Shebeen we hied,
But Det had shut fast ev’ry Grinder;
His Brain-box hung all-a-one Side,
And no Distiller’s Pig could be blinder;
But dat, you know, is what we must all cum to.

So shebeen, meaning to an unlicensed tavern or the booze served there, was well established in eighteenth-century Ireland. The word continues to be used in Ireland and Scotland and by the twentieth century would travel to South Africa, where it was used to refer to taverns in the Black townships.

By the 1860s and the U.S. Civil War, we also start seeing shebang in America. We can’t say this for certain, but this American shebang is likely a variation on the Irish word, as several of the early uses of shebang are in reference to an illicit drinking establishment, although most of the early uses are in the sense of a tent or rude dwelling. It may be that the word for a drinking establishment in a makeshift shelter, like what you might find in a soldier’s encampment, generalized to mean any makeshift shelter.

The earliest use of shebang that I have found is from a U.S. Christian Commission report from December 1864 about the organization’s missionary efforts among American soldiers. Here, shebang means some kind of makeshift commercial establishment catering to soldiers, perhaps a tavern, although that’s not made explicit:

Having obtained some idea of the dimensions of the rooms, we erected two large book-cases for Testaments, “soldiers’ books,” hymn-books, tracts, &c.; obtained another large black-walnut one for a library, and arranged suitable shelves for religious papers, and literary magazines of miscellaneous reading. Ample accommodations were also made for writing, and two long file-desks put up for the leading secular and religious newspapers [....] At first, soldiers would come in, rather hesitatingly, to inspect and to inquire the prices of things, and saying among themselves “that they allowed” it to be a sutler’s shop or some “shebang” following the army to keep “greenbacks from moulding.”

Shebang appears in the Yale Literary Magazine of February 1865 in a description of soldier slang. Here, it’s not clear what shebang means:

Here is the way they talk in that benighted neighborhood. “I have saw where you was goin at,” and “I have went where you couldn’t git to go.” “I never seen” any man have “such a right smart git,” as “me and him did.” “That there man there, what owns this shebang,” “Wounded his watch up,” “onct or twict,” “just like I do mine,” &c.

But many of the early uses of shebang refer to tents or other makeshift shelters, especially those used by prisoners of war. Here is one from Charles C. Nott’s 1865 Sketches in Prison Camps:

The prisoners at Camp Ford were poor. They even thought themselves too poor to borrow. They possessed no supplies to sell; and in manufactures they had not risen above carved pipes and chessmen. They lived on their rations and cooked those rations in the simplest manner. Half of them had no tables, and more than half no table furniture. The plates and spoons did treble duty, travelling about from “shebang” to “shebang” (as they called the hovels they had built) in regular succession.

And another prison-camp use can be found in A.J.H. Duganne’s 1865 Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf:

Fancy, then, a space of half a dozen acres, enclosed with a stockade of timbers eight feet high. One-sixth of this area is allotted to the officers, who dwell in log-cabins, erected by themselves or purchased from some former tenant. Each cabin hut, or “shebang,” as we term it, shelters and accommodates a mess. The numbers of a mess are various; some messes have no more than three, and others muster ten or twelve. These “shebangs” are arranged in streets, right-angled with a central thoroughfare called “Fifth Avenue.”

The sense of shebang meaning a civilian dwelling appears in the 1867 novel The Cabin in the Brush:

The man rose. “That ere boy’s got only a few hours afore him,” he said. “I reckon we’ll not get here afore he’s gone. But when you get him berried you’d better move off. Sime and the rest know as how your old man’s gone to the, Fed’als and they’re gwine to burn your shebang.”

And Ger. Falcon’s 1879 blackface sketch “Swing on the Garden Gate” uses shebang generally to refer to any establishment, in this case a laundry:

Estella—Den how did you know dat de laundry a man said dat?
Pomp.—Well, I cotched a job in his shebang scrapin’ de grease off de buzzoms an’ white—was hin’ dem.

So far, we have seen shebang used in contexts where it probably refers to a drinking establishment but where that exact meaning is not clear. But in U.S. Vidocq’s 1870 The Secrets of Internal Revenue we see that sense clearly. Vidocq was a U.S. Secret Service agent, and that agency was founded to crack down on tax cheats and counterfeiters (the mission of protecting the president would not come until the assassination of William McKinley in 1901), so breaking up bootlegging taverns was within the Secret Service’s ambit:

They first visited a “shebang” which was ostensibly a grocery store and whose appearance denoted honesty and fair dealing. An examination behind a pile of soap and tea, however, disclosed the existence of a “bar,” consisting of a plank extending across some barrels which contained liquors purporting to be of tine quality and choice brands.

And in 1880, shebang meaning a tavern or bar is used in T. Trask Woodward’s temperance play The Social Glass; or, Victims of the Bottle. In the play, the character of Farley owns a bar:

Well, that would be rather hard on old Farley. Why, if I leave off drinking it will surely “bust up” this old shebang. Farley has made more than half of his living off of Charley Thornley and me, ever since this ribbon movement struck the town. And I have got so that I want to guzzle the infernal stuff all the time. (Pause.) But, however, I guess I will try a dose of temperance, and kinder work it off.

So, we a have reasonably clear, albeit somewhat muddled, through line from the Irish síbín or shebeen to the American shebang. Upon coming to the new shore, the word changed form and expanded in meaning from illicit tavern to any kind of establishment or dwelling, although the specific sense of a drinking establishment was also maintained.

Just as the single word shebang starts appearing in the United States, we start to see the phrase the whole shebang. But at first, it appears as a co-location of words with a literal meaning, the entire dwelling, rather than a metaphorical phrase or idiom. In a congressional report on the race riots in Memphis, Tennessee in May 1866, where white residents and white police started massacring Black residents until the riot was suppressed by federal troops, whole “shebang” is used to mean the entire dwelling; the quotation marks around just shebang indicate that the writer did not yet consider this a set idiom:

One man came up and called out to a colored man to halt. The man stopped and gave up his pistol. I was scared. He had his pistol pointed right towards my house. He came into my house and dropped his knife. Then he came again and asked where his knife was. I did not know anything about his knife. He told me if I did not tell him where his knife was he would burn up the whole “shebang.” That was the last word he said.

A similar use appears in the 1868 Civil War novel Randolph Honor, where shebang refers to a soldier’s tent or perhaps to the group of soldiers who live and mess together:

But at that moment Captain Thorne came by. He saw my consternation, and asked the cause, when a shout replied—“Been at old White’s henroost. Captain—see that rooster’s tail sticking out of his hat.” It seems, the Captain had the day before arrested some of the men for that very deed. And when he ordered me to follow to his tent, after us came—“See, boys, chicken-soup for the whole shebang going into the Captain’s tent—cock-a-ra-a.” You may imagine I speedily let the rooster fly. But I did not lose with it my name of chicken-coop.

But we do see the idiom by 1870, when it appears in the novel Sea Drift, by Fadette, a pseudonym for Marian Calhoun Legare Reeves. Here, the phrase the whole shebang refers to a raft and all that is on it:

Eva watched, with anxious eyes, the progress of the little raft. But it floated bravely—bravely enough, as Evan, coming back for Luti, assured her, “to take the whole shebang at once, only Morgan refused to let the trial be made.”

In H.K. Stimson’s 1874 autobiography From the Stage Coach to the Pulpit the phrase is used to refer to a buggy and the team of ponies pulling it:

After we had driven around town for a while, mostly on the back streets, I suggested that he drive down one of the main business streets, and to the hotel. He said the “ponies were afraid of stages and covered wagons, not being used to them, and that we had gone far enough for me to judge.” “Well, I like their movement; what is your price for the outfit?” “Well, I will tell you, stranger: I am in a hurry to go back to Illinois; my father is not expected to live; I will take two hundred dollars for the whole ‘shebang.’ The wagon is a little worn, but the harness is new. I paid forty dollars for it last week.” I saw it was a bargain, and just what I wanted.

And humorist George W. Peck uses the whole shebang in 1880 to refer to an unfortunate iceboat accident:

In about a minute the boat neared the opposite shore, and we proposed to dismount, but before we could think a second time the whole shebang had gone up among the trees, and was trying to climb up one of them, the sail flapping, and the man who run the machine was under the boat with his head scalped. We came to in a couple of minutes, and found the skin knocked off lots of places, and one arm in a sling, one eye blacked, a boot heel torn off, and the back veranda of a pair of pants blown off in the gale. We hired a farmer to take us to Madison, and we sat all the way in a bushel basket of pine shavings, thinking of some way to kill off the man who invented ice boats.

It may be that síbín / shebeen and shebang are distinct words with no etymological connection, but there is reasonable evidence that strongly suggest shebang is an American alteration of the Irish word. In any case, the metaphorical the whole shebang is an outgrowth of shebang’s meaning of a dwelling.

Discuss this post

Sources:

The Cabin in the Brush. Philadelphia: J.P. Skelly, 1867, 62. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dillon, John Talbot. Travels Through Spain. London: G. Robinson, 1780, 168. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Du Bois, Dorothea. The Case of Ann Countess of Anglesey, Lately Deceased; Lawful Wife of Richard Annesley, Late Earl of Anglesey, and of Her Three Surviving Daughters, Lady Dorothea, Lady Caroline, and Lady Elizabeth, by the Said Earl. London: 1766, 13–14. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Duganne, A.J.H. Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf, second edition. New York: J.P. Robens, 1865, 377.

“Editor’s Table.” The Yale Literary Magazine, 30.4, February 1965, 152–53. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Fadette (pseudonym of Marian Calhoun Legare Reeves). Sea Drift. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, & Haffelinger, 1870, 64. Gale Primary Sources: American Fiction.

Falcon, Ger. “Swing on the Garden Gate.” In Ned Barry’s Grandmother’s Chair Songster. New York: New York Popular Publishing, 1879, 38. Bound with: The Annie Laurie Melodist. New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1879. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Genuine Trial at Bar, Between Campbell Craig, Lessee of James Annesley Esq; and Others, Plaintiff; and the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Anglesey, Defendant. London: M. Cooper, 1744, 63. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. whole shebang, n., shebang, n., shebeen, n.

Justice and Policy. An Essay on the Increasing Growth and Enormities of Our Great Cities, vol. 2. Dublin: 1773, 13–14. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“Luke Caffrey’s Kilmainham Minit.” The Irish Nosegay: or, Songster’s Companion. Dublin: P. Wogan, 1789, 142. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Massey, Charles. A Collection of Resolutions Queries, &c. Wrote on Occasion of the Present Dispute in the City of Limerick. Limerick: Andrew Walsh, 1749 36. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Nott, Charles C. Sketches in Prison Camps. New York: Anson D.F. Randolph, 1865, 150. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. shebang, n., shebeen, n.

Peck, George W. “A Ride on an Ice Boat.” Peck’s Fun. V.W. Richardson, ed. Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1880, 81. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Randolph Honor. New York: Richardson and Company, 1868, 339. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Stimson, H.K. From the Stage Coach to the Pulpit. St. Louis: R.A. Campbell, 1874, 281–82. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Trial in Ejectment (at Large) Between Campbell Craig, Lessee of James Annesley Esq; and Others, Plaintiff; and the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Anglesey, Defendant. London: J. and P. Knapton, et al., 1744, 124. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

U.S. Christian Commission. Information for Army Meetings. Philadelphia: Alfred Martien, December 1864, 23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

U.S. House of Representatives. Memphis Riots and Massacres, 39th Congress, 1st Session, Report No. 101, 25 July 1866, 186. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Vessey, Francis. Appendix to the Abridgment of the Statutes of Ireland. Dublin: George Grierson, 1788. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Vidocq, U.S. The Secrets of Internal Revenue. Philadelphia: William Flint, 1870, 75. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Woodward, T. Trask. The Social Glass; or, Victims of the Bottle. New York: Samuel French & Son, 1880, 33. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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