wog / golliwog

Cover image of Florence K. and Bertha Upton’s 1895 children’s book The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwog.” Image of two white, female dolls holding hands with a grotesquely caricatured black, male doll, all curtsying and bowing toward the reader. The Golliwog is depicted in typical blackface minstrel attire: blue jacket with tails and red bowtie and trousers.

30 August 2021

Wog is a racist slur, chiefly found in British speech. The word is used as a disparaging term for anyone who isn’t English, especially a person with darker skin or Asian facial features. It’s a clipping of golliwog, the name for a type of black-faced doll popular at the turn of the twentieth century. Golliwog, in turn, is a variation on pollywog.

Golliwog was coined by Florence Kate Upton and first appeared in print in the 1895 children’s book The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg,” which she wrote in collaboration with her mother, Bertha Upton. Bertha wrote the text and Florence supplied the illustrations. Her depiction of the golliwog was very much in the style of a blackface minstrel performer, dark skin with an afro hair style and wearing a blue jacket with tails and red trousers and bowtie. This passage introduces the golliwog:

“Just one leap more!” cries Sarah Jane,
“This fills my wildest dream!”
          E’en as she spoke,
          Peg’ Deutchland broke
Into a piercing scream.

Then all look round, as well they may
To see a horrid sight!
          The blackest gnome
          Stands there alone,
They scatter in their fright.

With kindly smile he nearer draws;
Begs them to feel no fear.
          “What is your name?”
          Cries Sarah Jane;
“The ‘Golliwogg’ my dear.”

The book was wildly successful on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Uptons would go on to publish a series of books featuring the character of the golliwogg. The books also inspired a lucrative market in golliwogg dolls.

There are many early references to the books and golliwogg dolls at the turn of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t long before golliwog, dropping the second terminal <g>, began to be used as a term for a foreigner, especially a dark-skinned one. There is this reference which appears in a short story published in the Augusta Chronicle of 30 September 1901. Exactly what golliwog refers to here is lost to us today, but it’s certainly not complimentary:

“Mrs. Jack Daring wears a woollen petticoat under her golf skirt,” interrupted Mrs. Max, “although under her waist she wears a paper waistcoat, which she says is warmer than a golf cape, but that is because she likes to show her figure; though Polly Stangner says Mrs. Jack creaks like a golliwog when she swings a club.”

A year later, this description of the punching power of boxer Robert Fitzsimmons appears in the 7 September 1902 Atlanta Journal. It mentions the Irish boxer Peter Maher, nicknamed the Galway Golliwog. In 1902, the Irish, while ranking above those of African or Asian descent in racist categorization schemes, were not considered to be equal to “whites” in American society:

The Fitzsimmons knockout drops were found most efficacious by these persons, and were used by all the notables of the ring, including “Jack” Dempsey, the pet of the Golden Gate; Peter Maher, the Galway Golliwog, and “Billie” McCarthy, the Soft Snap of the Sand Lots[.] In the face of the Fitzsimmons upper cut these gentlemen all went groggy in short order, and the coming champion ventured east in search of soft marks for his ever ready dukes.

And there is this from a short story in the Albany, New York Times-Union. The use of golliwog is in the sense of the doll, but the descriptor brute indicates how people viewed the character. The story is about a talking baby, who at one point says:

You sit glaring at me for ten minutes like—like that brute of a Golliwog I keep upstairs, and then you begin dozing over the fire for all the world like you’d just had a couple of ounces of food. And you expect me to say nothing.

And for unabashed racism, it is hard to top this use of golliwog to refer to a Polynesian man that appeared in short story published in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 28 February 1909:

One member of the Braddock household was not included in the general staff, being a mere appendage of the Professor himself. This was a dwarfish, mis-shapen Kanaka, a pigmy in height, but a giant in breadth, with short, thick legs, and long powerful arms. He had a large head, and somewhat handsome face, with melancholy black eyes and fine set of white teeth.

Like most Polynesians, his skin was of a pale bronze and elaborately tattooed, even the cheeks and chin being scored with curves of straight lines of mystical import.

“I do not like that Golliwog,” breathed Mrs. Jasher to her host, when the Cockatoo was at the sideboard. “He gives me the creeps.”

“Imagination, my dear lady, pure imagination. Why should we not have a picturesque animal to wait upon us?”

The clipping to wog happens a few years later. The earliest recorded uses are in World War I soldier slang published shortly after the war. There is this from Lionel James’s 1921 The History of King Edward’s Horse in a reference to events of 1917:

The King Edward’s Horse called the Indian Cavalry “The Wogs”—which is the diminutive of “Golliwogs,”—a description that was very apt of these dark apparitions in khaki and tin-hats.

The clipped form wog never caught on in American speech, and golliwog dropped out of American speech as memories of the books and dolls faded. But both continue as racist slurs to this day in British speech to this day.

The disappearance of the Uptons’ character from popular memory made room for speculation as to the origin of wog, and several false acronymic explanations developed to justify the term. The most common are westernized / worthy / wily / wonderful oriental gentleman or working on government service, this last supposedly stenciled on the shirts of Egyptian workers on the Suez Canal. Of course, these explanations are all false, with no evidentiary support.

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Sources:

Elverson, James. “The Green Mummy.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 February 1909, 6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

James, Lionel. The History of King Edward’s Horse. London: Sifton, Praed, 1921, 128. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Jenkins, Wilberforce. “Who’s What and Why in America.” Atlanta Journal, 7 September 1902, Feature Section 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Our Daily Story: It and I.” Times-Union (Albany, New York), 21 June 1904, 6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, modified March 2020, s.v. wog, n.1.; second edition, 1989, s.v. golliwog, n.

Townsend, Edward W. “Chronicle’s Daily Short Story: Maj. Max’s Ghost.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 30 September 1901, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Upton, Bertha. The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg.” Florence K. Upton, illus. Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, and Co., 1895. Project Gutenberg.

Image credit: Florence K. Upton. The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwog.” Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, and Co., 1895. Public domain image.

Toronto

The Toronto skyline viewed from Centre Island in Lake Ontario, featuring the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre (the domed structure), home to baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays.

27 August 2021

The name of the city in which I used to live is from the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk) word tkaronto / Aterón:to, meaning “trees standing in the water.” The name is a good example of how place names can shift geographically. It is not unusual for a name to start in one place and, over time, move to eventually become associated with a different place entirely. The name Toronto also has a long-standing false etymology attached to it.

Toronto was originally a reference to Native-American fishing weirs consisting of pilings (the so-called “trees standing in water”) with nets strung between them, driven into the narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, a location that is about 85 miles (137 km) north of the present city. Samuel de Champlain described the weirs in 1615 but did not record the Indigenous word. But a 1703 English translation of Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce Lahontan’s New Voyages to North-America refers to what is now called Matchedash Bay, an arm of Georgian Bay, as the Bay of Toronto. And a map accompanying the book shows the location of the fishing weirs and labels it Torontogerõn.

The name gradually drifted south, following a trade route from the interior to the shores of Lake Ontario. What is now the Humber River, which runs somewhat west of what is now the city center, began to be called Rivière Toronto. Eventually, the French built Fort Rouillé, also called Fort Toronto, located on the shore of Lake Ontario in what is now Exhibition Place. The French garrison abandoned and burned the fort in 1759 during the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War), but the name Toronto stuck to the site. The French fort and the name Toronto for the site are mentioned in the journal of Robert Rogers, an officer in the British army during the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) in the entries for the period 30 September to 1 October 1760:

There is a track of about 300 acres of cleared ground, round the place where the French had a fort, that was called Fort Toronto. The soil here is principally clay. The deer are extremely plenty in this country. Some Indians were hunting at the mouth of the river, who run into the woods at our approach, very much frightened. They came in, however, in the morning, and testified their joy at the news of our success against the French. They told us “that we could easily accomplish our journey from thence to Detroit in eight days: that when the French traded at that place, the Indians used to come with their poultry from Michlimakana, down the river Toronto: that the partage [sic] was but twenty miles from that to a river falling into Lake Huron, which had some falls, but none very considerable: they added, that there was a Carrying-place of fifteen miles from some westerly part of Lake Erie, to a river running without any falls, thro’ several Indian towns into Lake St. Clair.

I think Toronto a most convenient place for a factory, and that from thence we may easily settle the north-side of Lake Erie.

We left Toronto the 1st of October, steering  south, right across the west end of Lake Ontario. At dark we arrived at the south-shore, five miles west of Fort Niagara, some of our boats now become exceeding leaky and dangerous.

In 1787 the British bought a thousand square kilometers of land from the Mississauga Indians in what was known as the Toronto Purchase. But in 1793, when the British constructed their first settlement on the site of what is now the city, they called it York, after the Duke of York, Frederick Augustus, who had just won a military victory in Flanders against the French revolutionaries. The name York was an unpopular choice, because many preferred the native name they were familiar with and because it could be confused with New York or any of a number of other Yorks, but it remained official until 1834 when the city was incorporated under the name Toronto. Vestiges of the York name remain, for example the neighborhood I used to live in is known as North York.

There is a story that the name Toronto is from a Native American word meaning “place of meeting,” supposedly a reference to a grouping of native villages on the shores of Lake Ontario. This origin is incorrect. This false etymology was first promulgated by historian Henry Scadding in his 1873 book Toronto of Old, in which he assumed the name comes from the Huron toronton, defined by Gabriel Sagard in his 1636 Dictionnarie de la Langue Huronne as “il y en a beaucoup” (there are many). Scadding mentions the “trees rising out of the water” explanation, but dismisses it as a misinterpretation by Europeans, who upon hearing the word assumed it applied to the tall trees in the area around the native settlements.

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Sources:

Champlain, Samuel De. Voyages of Samuel de Champlain 1604–1618. W.L. Grant, ed. Original Narratives of Early American History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907, 288. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce. New Voyages to North-America, vol. 1 of 2. London: H. Bonwicke, et al., 1703, 182 Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

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.

Rogers, Robert. Journals. London: J. Millan, 1765, 206–07. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Scadding, Henry. Toronto of Old. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, 1873, 3,73–75. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Aaron Davis, 2020. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

with a grain of salt

A dish of sea salt

26 August 2021

To take something with a grain of salt means to not accept a statement at face value, to question its veracity or accuracy. This is an example of a dead metaphor. The idiom is oft used, but few, if any, understand what salt has to do with trusting a statement.

The English phrase is a translation of the Latin cum grano salis. And that phrase may have been inspired by a passage in Pliny the Elder’s (c.23–79 C.E.) Natural History. In writing about walnuts, Pliny records this anecdote (or antidote):

In sanctuariis Mithridatis maximi regis devicti Cn. Pompeius invenit in peculiari commentario ipsius manu conpositionem antidoti e duabus nucibus siccis, item ficis totidem et rutae foliis xx simul tritis, addito salis grano; ei quo hoc ieiunus sumat nullum venenum nociturum illo die.

(After the mighty king Mithridates had been defeated, Gnaeus Pompey found in a personal notebook in his private archive a prescription for an antidote written in the king’s own hand: two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue were ground together. When one will have added a grain of salt, he who would take this while fasting would not be harmed by poison for that day.)

First, note that Pliny does not write cum grano salis, but rather uses the verb addere, to add. Second, Pliny’s passage is ambiguous. The grain of salt could be an essential element in the antidote. Or it could be an addition to make the mixture easier to swallow. Or there is a third possibility. The Latin word sal generally meant salt, but it could also mean common sense, wit, or sarcasm. Pliny may have meant the idea that this antidote would work was ludicrous and not to be believed.

In any case, the anecdote about Mithridates became quite well known, and Pliny’s version could very well be the inspiration for the English phrase. If not, the second sense of sal meaning common sense explains the metaphor without resorting to this particular story.

In English writing, we see the Latin cum grano salis being used in the metaphorical sense of doubt in Thomas Morton’s 1609 A Catholike Appeale for Protestants, a critique of Roman Catholic theology:

The testimonie of their imagined Cyprian, which proueth no more that the bread is changed into flesh, then it proueth that (for it is the same Authors comparison) Christs humanitie is changed into his Diuinitie: which without heresie, cannot be directly affirmed.

If they shall still persist in the seeming shews of words, then must they be admonished to construe the meaning of these words of that Cyprian; This consecrated bread (saith he) giueth life & increase vnto our bodies. Which kind of speech, euen in the iudgement of their owne Cardinall, cannot be literally vnderstood without absurditie; and therefore may instruct our Apologists to reade such like sacramentall phrases of ancient Fathers, at least, cum grano salis, with a graine of reasonable salt of better discretion, then hitherto they haue done.

Morton adds a “reasonable” to the phrase, indicating that the idiom was not yet well established in English, and would help to explain the second meaning of the Latin sal to those unfamiliar with it.

Several decades later we see the Latin paired with its English translation in Richard Carpenter’s 1641 Experience, Historie, and Divinitie:

The terms of Divinitie are to be taken into the mouth, as the Canonists speak, cum grano salis, with a grain of salt, that is, wisely tasted, and understood: otherwise, they will not prove good nourishment.

And we see the English phrase standing on its own, no Latin present, in John Trapp’s 1647 commentary on the biblical book of Revelation:

We doubt not (saith a learned Interpreter here) but that the crowned Saints do in generall know the afflicted condition of the Church militant, and do wish them deliverance: but our speciall necessities and occurrences of particular persons they cannot know. Brother Bradford (said Bishop Ridley, a little afore he was offered up) so long as I shall understand thou art in thy journey, by Gods grace I shall call upon our heavenly Father to set thee safely home: and then, good brother, speak you for the remnant that are to suffer for Christs sake, according to that thou then shalt know more clearly. But this is to be taken with a grain of salt.

In the end, the origin of this phrase is in this second sense of the Latin sal meaning common sense. It could be inspired by Pliny, who was using a similar wording in a literal sense, but we can’t say that with any degree of certainty.

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Sources:

Carpenter, Richard. Experience, Historie, and Divinitie. London: I.N. for John Stafford, 1641, 167. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879, s. v. sal. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Morton, Thomas. A Catholike Appeale for Protestants. London: Richard Field impensis George Field and John Norton, 1609, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Pliny the Elder. Natural History, Volume VI: Books 20–23. W.H.S. Jones, trans. Loeb Classical Library 392. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1951, 23:77, 514.

Trapp, John. A Commentary or Exposition Upon All the Epistles, and the Revelation of John the Divine. London: A.M. for John Bellamy, 1647, 516. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Picture credit: National Institute of Korean Language, 2016. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Korea license.

hashish / assassin

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.

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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

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.

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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.