punter

1799 hand-colored aquatint of men betting on a horse race. A crowd of men on horses jostle each other at a betting post, attempting to make bets on a race that is already underway in the background. Identifiable characters in the image include thoroughbred owner Dennis O’Kelly, in a blue coat, on a white horse and holding crutches needed for his gout, and the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) in the red coat.

10 September 2021

Punter is a British slang term for a non-professional gambler, a con man’s mark or victim, a customer of a not-quite-legitimate business, or a prostitute’s client (i.e., a john), with the connotation of a person who can be taken advantage of. The origin is uncertain, but the gambling sense is clearly the original one. The Oxford English Dictionary says punter is probably from a combination of the French ponte and ponter and the Spanish punto, both terms from various card games, but the chronology argues against this, as punter is attested nearly a century before the French or Spanish terms make their way into English.

The earliest attestation of punter that I can find is from 1571, in a list of qualities for which a priest that will be investigated during an inspection by the bishop of London:

Whether your Person, Vicar, or curate, doth openly or secretly, teach or maintaine any erronious or superstitious doctrine. And whether he doe keepe anye suspected woman in his house, or be an inconuenient person, giuen to dronkennesse, or ydlenesse, or be a haunter of Tauernes, Alehouses, or suspected places, a Punter, Banker, Dicer, Carder, Tabler, Swearer, or otherwise give any euill example of life.

[Caveat: the electronic scan of this work in EEBO is not good. The word in question appears to be punter, but an examination of an actual copy of the book, or a better scan, is required to verify that it is indeed punter.]

In contrast, the French and Spanish terms don’t start appearing until the latter half of the seventeenth century. It may be that ponte and punto made their way to England much earlier than we have evidence for, or that these imports reinforced the already existing term.

We see the Spanish punto in a 1660 description of the game of ombre:

By this you see first that the Spadillio, or Ace of Spades is alwayes the first Card, and always Trump, be the Trump what suit soever; and the Basto, or Ace of Clubs always the third. Secondly, that of Black, there are but eleven Trumps, & of Red twelve. Thirdly, that the red Ace enters in the fourth place when it is trump, and then is called the Punto, otherwise ’tis onely rankt after the Knave, and is onely call’d the Ace.

And by the end of the seventeenth century, a punt is being used to mean a gambler who bets against the bank in baccarat, faro, or basset. From Thomas D’Urfey’s 1698 play The Campaigners:

Because I had a little ill luck last night, which was look’d upon as a Miracle too by all the Bassett-Table, the most skilful of all the Punts bless’d himself to see’t; for during the time of play, I had once from an Alpiew or Paroli, Sept et la va, Quinze et le va, Trent en le va: Nay, once Soissant et le va, and yet lost all at last, but ’twas a thousand to one, my Dear.

And a few years later, D’Urfey uses punt again in his 1704 poem Hell Beyond Hell: or the Devil and Mademoiselle:

Then when the Gaming-Night came on,
As Gorgeous as the Mid-day Sun
Th’ Assembly meets, and on the Board,
Scatters like Jove, the dazzling Hoard;
Salutes the *Punts with Bows and Dops,
’Midst Rolls of Fifty, thick as Hops;
And lastly, deals with such Success,
Managing Paroli and Fasse
So well, she all their Purses dreins,
And scarce can count her bulky Gains.

The note for punts reads “a term for Basset-Players,” indicating that D’Urfey did not assume his readers would know this term.

And the verb to punt, meaning to bet against the bank in one of those card games is in place soon after. From a fictional and facetious journal published in Joseph Addison’s Spectator on 11 March 1712:

WEDNESDAY. [...] From Six to Eleven. At Basset. Mem. Never set again upon the Ace of Diamonds.

THURSDAY. From Eleven at Night to Eight in the Morning. Dream’d that I punted to Mr. Froth.

So, the gambling sense was firmly in place by the early eighteenth century. It isn’t until the twentieth century that we see punter generalize. By 1934 it had come to mean a con man’s mark. Philip Allingham’s 1934 book Cheapjack defines punter as:

Punter: A grafter’s customer, client or victim; a “sucker.”

But it need not be that blatant. Punter could just mean the client or customer of a less-than-reputable enterprise. Xavier “Gipsy” Petulengo’s 1936 A Romany Life, about his life traveling and selling various herbal nostrums and cures:

I was heading south to Kentucky. The negro population was getting thick at each move. But they were fairly good “punters” for my pills, and somehow a negro has that instinctiveness about him that “nature's way is the right way,” and I found that the negroes were in many ways superior to white folk. They usually listened to an explanation without sarcasm and heckling, as is usual with a white crowd. We generally know these hecklers. They are mostly people who are in a business to which naturally the herbalist is a gentle rival, but we generally get the best of an argument by saying that the ancients of the Biblical days took herbs as medicine many years before the multiple drug store opened up a branch in their High Street.

No, punter did not make its way into American slang; it remains distinctly British. While the people Petulengo was describing are American, he himself is English and uses British terms, as you can also see in his use of High Street.

And punter would come to mean a prostitute’s client. From Stanley Jackson’s 1946 Indiscreet Guide to Soho:

The professional tarts [...] rarely pay for a drink and some club proprietors encourage them to bring in their “punters” or clients.

And on 15 March 1970 the London Sunday Times published an interview with a young prostitute that used the term several times:

Sally is only eighteen but she’s been a prostitute three years. She has a bank account at Lloyds and is making up to £30 a night. She has a pixie face, short black hair and big dark eyes. Her face is very white, partly because it rarely sees the sun, partly from too much make-up. Sally is still young, pert and pretty. But if the price is right, she’ll do “anything a punter wants.”

[...]

Why do I do it?—Money, that’s all. A punter to me isn’t a man. He’s just a bloke with some money and I’m trying to get it off ’im. Next day I wouldn’t recognise ’im in the street. I never get any sexual pleasure from it. It’s just a day’s work. Besides, most of the blokes are so old and ugly.

[...]

I spend my money like water, mostly on clothes. Then there’s the cost of the hotel room. I pay two quid a night for that. And there’s jewellery and make-up, and food. And rubbers, too. I always make the punter wear a rubber, even though I can’t have children myself the doctor says. I’ve never had a disease. I go for a check-up at least once a month.

The origin of punter may be somewhat mysterious, but its semantic development is clear, from gambler to someone who engages in a variety of other scams or vices.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Addison, Joseph. The Spectator, no. 323, 11 March 1712, 8. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Allingham, Philip. Cheapjack. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1934, xv. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

D’Urfey, Thomas. The Campaigners: or, the Pleasant Adventures at Brussels. London: A. Baldwin, 1698, 3.1, 24. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. “Hell Beyond Hell: or the Devil and Mademoiselle.” Tales Tragical and Comical. London: Bernard Lintott, 1704, 94. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

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

Leland, Timothy. “Look!” The Sunday Times (London), 15 March 1970, 60. Gale Primary Sources: Sunday Times Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2007, modified March 2020, s.v. punter, n.1;  modified June 2020, s.v. punt, v.1; modified December 2020, s.v. punt, n.2, punto, n.3.

Petulengro, Xavier “Gipsy.” A Romany Life. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1936. 203. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Royal Game of the Ombre. London: William Brook, 1660, 4. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Sandys, Edwin. Articles to Be Enquired of in the Visitation of the Dioces of London. London: William Seres, 1571, sig. B.1.r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Thomas Rowlandson, “Betting,” 1799. Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain image.

docket / shadow docket

The US Supreme Court as it was composed in 2020–21. Chief Justice John Roberts is seated in the center. The associate justices are, left to right, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Stephen Breyer, Amy Coney Barrett, and Sonia Sotomayor. Nine people in black robes arrayed in front of a red curtained background.

9 September 2021

The US Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has taken to deciding a number of highly consequential, and sometimes high-profile, cases via what is called the shadow docket. But what is the shadow docket? And for that matter, what is a docket and where does that word come from?

The phrase shadow docket starts being used in legal circles in the early 2000s but in slightly different senses and contexts than it is used in reference to the Supreme Court. But all these senses refer to items on a court’s agenda that hidden from plain view.

The earliest use that I have found is from the practice of county courts in Florida to not publish or publicize cases that involved those who were influential, rich, or famous. From an editorial in the Tampa Tribune of 21 June 2006:

The local scrutiny comes in response to an investigation by Attorney General Charlie Crist of whether Broward County has a shadow docket featuring prominent people. The existence of the hidden list creates the appearance that some people have received special treatment.

And around 2012, shadow docket was used in New York City courts to denote the list of real estate foreclosures that languished without action on the courts’ dockets because the lenders had stopped filing paperwork. From the New York Post of 15 July 2012:

According to attorneys at the non-profit MFY Legal Services based in Manhattan, plaintiffs by and large could not verify the documents and stopped filing RJIs [Requests for Judicial Interventions], leaving borrowers in limbo in the court system.

A study by MFY in April 2012 found that almost 75 percent of cases filed in Queens and Brooklyn in October 2011—one year after the rule was implemented—were held up in courts in what is known as the “shadow docket.”

Use of the phrase shadow docket in reference to the Supreme Court was first made by law professor William Baude in a New York Times op-ed column on 3 February 2015. Baude uses shadow docket as a synonym for what is more conventionally known as the orders docket. Baude explains:

Mr. Warner’s execution illustrates the high stakes in a crucial part of the court’s work that most people don’t know anything about: its orders docket.

Work at the Supreme Court is divided into two main categories. One is deciding the cases it hears on the merits: the 70-some cases each year that the court selects for extensive briefing, oral argument and a substantial written opinion, sometimes with dissents. These are the cases we hear about in the news.

The orders docket includes nearly everything else the court must decide—which cases to hear, procedural matters in pending cases, and whether to grant a stay or injunction that pauses legal proceedings temporarily. There are no oral arguments in these cases and, as in Mr. Warner’s situation, they are often decided with no explanation.

This docket operates in such obscurity that I call it the “shadow docket.” (I was a law clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2008–9, but these views are solely mine.)

Despite their obscurity, these orders—there are thousands each year, if you count decisions not to hear cases—are significant. Consider the flurry of orders issued in the month before the 2014 election. The court stopped Wisconsin from implementing a strict voter identification law while it allowed a similar law to be implemented in Texas, and it also stopped lower courts from expanding early voting in Ohio or voter registration in North Carolina.

The orders docket exists for good reason. Many procedural decisions are routine, even pro forma, and need no lengthy consideration. Others, such as a decision as to whether executing someone is constitutional, cannot wait for a full hearing, so the court may grant a stay on the orders docket to give themselves time to decide whether they should consider the case on the merits. But when substantive decisions are made in secrecy and with little or no explanation, justice can be short-circuited, lower courts are left in limbo as to what to do with similar cases, and faith in the court is eroded.

Baude claimed coinage in this op-ed, and it is likely that, those earlier uses being localized ones, he had never seen the term shadow docket before, or at most he was not conscious of having seen them. In any case, he deserves credit for applying the term to the Supreme Court. It is not at all unusual for a term to have multiple related, but slightly different, senses in early usage—different groups will independently coin a term or interpret and apply a term in slightly different ways, before the term settles down into a single, widely accepted meaning.

That explains where the shadow part comes from, but what about docket?

The origin of docket is a bit more uncertain, but it probably comes from the word dock, meaning the flesh part of an animal’s tail, as opposed to the hair—think of a horse’s tale. The origin of dock is obscure, but the word has cognates in other Germanic languages. The word is first recorded c.1390 in the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a passage describing the Green Knight’s horse:

Þe tayl and his toppyng twynnen of a sute
And bounden boþe wyth a bande of a bryʒt grene
Dubbed wyth ful dere stonez, as þe dok lasted,
Syþen þrawen wyth a þwong.

(The tail and his mane were twins of a set, and both were bound with a band of bright green, arrayed with very precious stones, extending to the dock, then drawn up with a thong.)

At around the same time the verb to dock, meaning to cut something short, also appears. From the description of the Reeve in the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales:

The REVE was a sclendre colerik man.
His berd was shave as ny as ever he kan;
His heer was by his erys ful round yshorn;
His top was dokked lyk a preest biforn.

(The Reeve was a slender, choleric man. His beard was shaved as close as could be; his hair was shorn all around by his ears; the top of his head was docked in front like a priest’s.)

This verb is still used in reference to cutting animals’ tails. But the verb to dock is also used in reference to cutting or curtailing other things, as in the phrase to dock someone’s pay. This use is also quite old, recorded only a decade or so after Sir Gawain and the Canterbury Tales. It appears in an anonymous, anti-clerical poem titled Jack Upland, set down in 1402. The poem, which draws upon William Langland’s Piers Plowman for inspiration, details exchanges between a man, Jack Upland, and a friar, exposing the corruption in the friar’s order:

And so þou mysse takist Ierom, & lyest on Bernarde,
For Alrede his clerke wrote þis reson
Þat þou mysse layst & dokkist it as þe likiþ.

(And so, you mistake Jerome and lie about Bernard, for Alrede, his clerk, wrote this argument, that you sinfully beat and dock it as you like.)

The word docket appears within a century, meaning a summary or abstract of official proceedings—an abridgement, after all, is a form of cutting. From the Liber niger domus regis Angliae (Black Book of the King of England), which isn’t a list of the those with whom the king has had dalliances, but which sets forth regulations for the governing of the household of King Edward IV. We don’t know exactly when it was written, but it must date to sometime before 1483, the year of Edward’s death:

For the resorte of the comers, as it is before sayde, yf her noble presence be in this courte, then the doggettes in the countyng house bere witnesse bothe of her venit et recessit ad curiam, vel a curia, post prandium sive ante, tociens queeins.

(For the benefit of the arrivals, as has been said before, if her noble presence is in this court, then the dockets in the counting house should bear witness both of her coming and departure to the court, or from the court, before or after dinner, as often the queen likes.)

By the mid seventeenth century, docket had come to mean a registry of legal judgments. We see this sense in the Diary of Samuel Pepys for 12 March 1669. The passage here is longer than it need be, but I couldn’t bear to dock it for reasons that will be clear upon reading:

And here I did set a clerk to look out for some things for me in their books, while W Hewers and I to the Crowne Office, where we met with several good things that I wanted and did take short notes of the Dockets; as so back to the Patent Office and did the like there, and by candle-light ended; and so to home, where thinking to meet my wife with content, after my pains all this day, I find her in her closet, alone in the dark, in a hot fit of railing against me, upon some news she hath this day heard of Deb's living very fine, and with black spots, and speaking ill words of her mistress; which with good reason might vex her, and the baggage is to blame; but God knows, I know nothing of her nor what she doth nor what becomes of her; though God knows, my devil that is within me doth wish that I could.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, docket took on a related, but slightly different, sense, that of a register of pending cases before a court of law. From the minutes of the Pennsylvania General Assembly for 23 March 1790:

Whereas a respectable number of the inhabitants of the western part of York county have, by their petition to this Assembly, set forth, that they labour under very considerable difficulties and inconveniences, in consequence of their being obliged to attend at York-Town as their seat of justice, owing to the great distance many of them are from it, and the crouded situation of the docquet, whereby they are much difficulted to obtain justice.

So, that’s how docket went from an animal’s tail to the agenda before a court of law.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2002, lines 191–94, 214. London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.10.

Baude, William. “The Supreme Court’s Secret Decisions.” New York Times, 3 February 2015, A23. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Bockmann, Rick. “SE Queens Leads City with 42% of Foreclosures.” New York Post, 15 July 2012, Queens Weekly 16. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “General Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1.587–90. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

“Court Dockets Should Not Be Kept Secret.” Tampa Tribune, 21 June 2006, 12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Heyworth, P.L., ed. “Upland’s Rejoinder.” Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply and Upland’s Rejoinder. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968, lines 342–44, 112. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 41.

Liber niger domus regis Angliae; id est, Domus regiae sive aulae Angliae Regis Edw. IV.  (The Black Book of the King of England; that is, the Royal House or Court of the King of England Edward IV.) In A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household. London: Jon Nichols for the Society of Antiquaries, 1790, 24. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. dok, n., dokken, v.  

Minutes of the Second Session of the Fourteenth General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (23 March 1790). Philadelphia: Hall and Sellers, 1790, 207. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. docket, n.1, dock, n.2, dock, v.1.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys (12 March 1669), vol. 9 of 10. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1976, 480–1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Fred Schilling, 2020, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States. Public domain image.

world war

Soldiers of the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade in the trenches at Gallipoli, 1915. Three Sikh soldiers in a sandbagged trench alongside a slingshot-like device for hurling bombs.

7 September 2021

Often the term for a thing is coined before that thing actually exists. One such case where prognosticating neologists have been right is the term world war. There have been two wars in history that are commonly labeled world wars. These two wars are, of course, World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1937–45). The Second World War is often dated from 1939, but that’s a Eurocentric viewpoint, ignoring the start of hostilities between Japan and China in 1937—if you’re going to call it a world war, you can’t ignore an entire continent where millions died in that war.

But back to the main point, the phrase world war, referring to a war fought around the globe, dates to at least 1848, when it appears in an article in The People’s Journal about how the rise of a great power outside of Europe (i.e., the United States) will mean that future conflicts will necessarily be global in scale:

This great republic is the paramount state on the American continents, and the third, if not the second, power in the world. And it is rapidly preparing to contend for the first place. It is customary to speak of England, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria as “the five great powers;” and in diplomatic science to regard these as the only states which are competent to take the initiative in political matters. It is time for us to amend our classification. Nations take rank according to the powers of mischief—a strange standard for a Christian people in the nineteenth century, but in the logic of accepted statesmanship the only true one. Yet even in this, the United States yield to no power in Europe. A war amongst the great powers is now necessarily a world-war: one that is, can be, confined to land operations, can only be of secondary importance. The battles which shall in the future create new empires—if, indeed, there be any more such, as we fear there will, although we hope otherwise—must be fought upon the high seas. Nations may now be destroyed at a distance from their centres of government; and those who have command of the ocean are the masters of the world.

But it would take over fifty years for a world war to actually break out. The phrase first world war was first used to refer to the 1914–18 war by German biologist Ernest Haeckel on 20 September 1914, a few weeks after the war had started, although he used it as a descriptor, not a label:

There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared “European war,” which directly or indirectly draws all other countries into the conflict, and so will become the first world war in the full sense of the word, will surpass all previous wars.

By the next month, people were already referring to it as the world war. An article by Charles Lowe titled The Great War makes an early use of that term in the Illustrated London News of 10 October 1914:

It is now nine and a-half weeks since the world-war began, and for the greater part of that period—or since the German march on Paris took the form of a retreat to the region of the rivers, the “Mesopotamia” of Northern France—every week, like a fresh turn of the kaleidoscope, has brought new victories and more encouragement to the Allies.

And by 1918 people were already attaching a number to the war, expecting that it would not be “the war to end all wars.” From the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Repington for 10 September 1918, which would be published in 1920 under the title, The First World War:

I saw Major Johnstone, the Harvard Professor who is here to lay the bases of an American History. We discussed the right name of the war. I said that we called it now The War, but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War. To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.

And from time to time, people have used world war to refer to struggles other than the between belligerent nations. For instance, the Manchester Guardian of 18 February 1919 ran an article with the headline World War No. 2 about the struggle against economic deprivation.

As to the next actual world war, the phrase second world war was being bandied about by 1920, but again the early uses were as descriptors, not labels. From an article in the Sunday Pictorial section of London’s Sunday Mirror for 4 January 1920:

What I foresee is the rekindling of implacable hate and the foundations of a second world war, for nations will never forget or forgive a humiliation of the nature contemplated.

Actual labeling of the war as World War II happened shortly after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. From Time magazine of 4 September 1939:

Jan Christiaan Smuts, Minister of Justice and hero of World War I, cautioned South Africans to discuss World War II as little as possible because they “are living far away and are not conversant with the facts.”

And before the Second World War was over, people were already discussing the third. From The Economist of 2 January 1943:

Post-war economic policy will take place in two periods: the first of relief, the second of reconstruction. During the period of relief, the appalling shortages of the occupied and belligerent countries will have to be made good, mainly from American reserves and resources. Preparations for these relief measures are already being made. During this period, extensive planning and control will still be necessary, but the area of control should be gradually relaxed. In the second period, that of reconstruction, failure to grapple with realities would lead to a third World War. The success of the totalitarian states was largely due to the failure of the democracies to find the right answer to the problems of reconstruction after the last war.

And the prospect of World War III being primarily between the Soviet Union and the United States was raised by U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace in March 1943, when the two nations were still allies, as reported by the Daily Telegraph of 9 March 1943:

Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, speaking at Delaware, Ohio, to-day, declared that “unless the Western democracies and Russia come to a satisfactory understanding before the war ends, I very much fear that World War No. 3 will be inevitable.”

He added that, without a close and trusting understanding between Russia and the United States, “there was grave probability of Russia and Germany sooner or later making common cause.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to world wars, the prognosticators tend to be Cassandras.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

“Call for Understanding with Russia.” Daily Telegraph (London), 9 March 1943, 3. Gale Primary Sources: The Telegraph Historical Archive.

Dixon, Hepworth. “The American Republics.” The People’s Journal, vol. 4, 1848, 249–50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Empire.” Time, 4 September 1939, 22. EBSCOhost Time Magazine Archive.

Haeckel, Ernest. “Noted German Scholar Places Blame of Starting War on Great Britain.” Indianapolis Sunday Star (Indiana), 20 September 1914, 37. NewspaperArchive.com.

Harrison, Austin. “The Problem of War Guilt.” Sunday Pictorial (Sunday Mirror, London), 4 January 1920, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Mirror Historical Archive, 1903-2000.

Lowe, Charles. “The Great War.” Illustrated London News, 10 October 1914, 3. Gale Primary Sources: The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842–2003.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, modified March 2021, s.v. world war, n.; September 2014, modified June 2021, s.v. first, adj., adv., and n.2; second edition, 1989, s.v. second, adj. and n.2, third, adj. (and adv.) and n.

“Post-War Reconstruction—A View.” The Economist, 2 January 1943, 14. Gale Primary Sources: The Economist Historical Archive.

Repington, Charles à Court. The First World War 1914–1918, vol. 2 of 2. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920, 391. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Whiteing, Richard. “World War No. 2.” Manchester Guardian, 18 February 1919, 10. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo Credit: Reginald Arthur Savory, 1915. British National Army Museum. Public domain image.

coney / Coney Island

Photo, c.1912, of a man and two women strolling down a city street eating hot dogs. Two men and a ladder are in the background. The photo is labeled, “Hot Dog,” Coney.

6 September 2021

(Revised 8 September 2021, adding the possible Indigenous origins of the name Coney Island)

The word coney is from the Anglo-Norman conin (rabbit), which is attested in the thirteenth century. The French word comes from the classical Latin cuniculus (rabbit, tunnel/burrow). There are no native Germanic or Celtic cognates for the word, and those cognates that exist in those languages today are borrowings from either English or Anglo-Norman.

Strangely, rabbits in Britain are something of an archeological anomaly. Rabbits were native to Britain in prehistoric times but there is no evidence of them being on the islands after the last ice age, evidence for them reappearing in the early thirteenth century. This is odd, because rabbits were a dietary staple of English peasantry in the later Middle Ages. (They were one of the few sources of meat readily available to commoners.) Rabbits were also commonly farmed by the Romans, so one would think there would have been husbandry of rabbits in Roman and post-Roman Britain, but there is no evidence of this being the case.

As a result, there is no Old English word for rabbit, but there is one anomalous word appearing in an Old English charter that may be related. The toponym Conigrave can be found in a description of territorial boundaries in a 936 C.E. land grant:

On radanforde þanen endlang brokes on conigraue est and nortward þanen, on rigte to Wedergrave.

(To red-ford then along the brook to the northeast part of coneygrove then straight on to sheep[?]-grove.)

Conigrave may be a post-Conquest scribal error for *comgrave (coomb-grove), with the scribe misreading the < m > as < ni >—minim confusion is a common scribal error—or perhaps it could be place where domesticated rabbits were kept, either an addition by a later scribe—the surviving manuscripts are copies from the fourteenth century—or perhaps the sole scrap of evidence that there were rabbits in Britain at the time.

Coney doesn’t appear in English until the twelfth century, and then it is in reference to the animal’s fur, not the animal itself. From a passage in a homiletic poem that gives a description of heaven, saying there are no worldly luxuries there.

Ne sal þar ben foh, ne grai, ne cunin, ne ermine
Ne aquerne ne metheschele ne beuer ne sabeline.
Ne sal þer ben naðer scat ne srud ne wereldes well none.

(There shall be no variegated, nor gray, nor coney, nor ermine [furs], nor squirrel-fur, nor marten fur, nor beaver, nor sable-fur. There shall be neither sheet nor shroud nor any of the world’s wealth.)

The use of coney to refer to the animal itself is recorded in the early fourteenth century. It is used in a political poem, a pun on the name of Pieter de Coninck, a Flemish weaver and leader of a peasant revolt against French rule (1323–28):

We shule flo þe Conyng, and make roste is loyne;
þe word shal springen of him in-to coloyne,
so hit shal to Acres, & in-to sesoyne,
          ant maken him ful wan.

(We shall flay the Coney and roast his loin; the message of him shall carry to Cologne, so it shall go to Acre, and into Saxony and make him very pale.)

That’s where coney comes from. But to Americans, at least to those from the greater New York City metropolitan area, coney may be chiefly known through Coney Island. The western portion of the beach resort in Brooklyn has been at times an island, and at other times the channel silted up, connecting it to the rest of the peninsula that is now Coney Island. The origin of the name is uncertain. It was called by the Dutch Conyne Eylant (rabbit island), but whether it was so named because of rabbits who lived there or if that is a Dutch variation on an Indigenous place name is the question.

Detail of a copy of a 1639 Dutch map marking the location of Conyné Eylant (lower left)

The Dutch name Conyne Eylant appears on the Manatus map, a 1670 copy of what is believed to be a map from 1639. That map also marks a Munsee village named Techkonis. It is possible that the -konis element of that name was transferred to Coney Island. But nothing is known of this village—this map is the only known reference to the village. The village would have been either purchased by the Dutch in the early 1640s and the inhabitants forced out or they would have been massacred by the Dutch in Kieft’s War (1643–45). (Some sources on the web credit the name to an alleged Munsee band known as the Konoh or Konoi, meaning bear. This claim would seem to arise from the village of Techkonis, but since nothing other than its name is known of this village, no more can be said of it. If there was such a band, the name would not translate as “bear.”)

In English, the name Conyne Island appears as early as 7 May 1654 in a deed conveying right to the island from the Lenape to English settlers living in Gravesend, across the channel on Long Island:

Gravesend, May the seventh, 1654. Certain Indians, viz., Mattenoh, Sachemacko of Niocko being demanded against a certain parcel of land, viz. a neck of land from Antonie Johnson’s house southward and on Island called Conye Island, to whom it did belong unto, they did all declare that it was to their knowledge the right and true proper land of Guttaquoh, and called by them Narriockh, that is to say, the Island; and the neck of land is called by them Manahanung, and in testimony of the premises have hereunto set their hands.

From this deed, it appears that Narriockh is the western tip of what is now Coney Island, in 1654 a separate island, and the remainder was known to the Munsee as Manahanung. The existence of these Munsee names militates against, but does not eliminate, the possibility of Coney Island having some kind of Indigenous origin. Some sources translate Narriockh as “land of light” or “land of no shadow,” but this translation appears to be spurious.

Another explanation is that the name Coney comes from a member of Henry Hudson’s crew, John Colman, who was killed there in 1609. Colman did indeed die on Coney Island, but nothing connects him with the name. Others suggest the name derives from a Dutch surname of settlers there, but no evidence for this conjecture has been put forth.

The spelling Coney Island appears by 1685 in George Scot’s The Model of the Government of the Province of East-New-Jersey in America:

Richard Hartshorn hath a Plantation, with considerable Land belonging to it, part within, and part without Sandy Hook, which with a part of Coney Island, and Long Island opposite to it, makes the entrance into the Bay that goes up to Now-York [sic], and also to the Lands of East-New-Jersey.

Coney Island is famous for its hot dogs, and that delicacy has been variously called a Coney Island, a Coney Island dog, a Coney Island hot dog, and simply a Coney dog. This appellation goes back to at least 1895 when it appears in the 6 September issue of the Syracuse Daily Standard in an article about health inspections of meat-packing plants:

The city meat inspector said that he had twice a week made the rounds of the market but the only thing he had found out of the way was one carcass of beef that he had had thrown away. This meat has been sold to a sausage maker and would have been all [bound] up into red hot Coney Islands had it not been for the city’s officer.

Despite the name, perhaps the one thing that hot dogs have never been accused of containing is rabbit meat.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. conin.

Birch, Walter de Gray. “Carta Regis Athelstan de Merksburi” (Birch 709). Cartularium Saxonicum, vol. 2 of 3. London: Whiting, 1887, 416. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Fein, Susanna Greer, David Raybin, Jan Ziolkowski, eds. “Art. 48, Lustneth, Lordinges, Bothe Yonge Ant Olde.” The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2 of 3. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, lines 69–72.

Grumet, Robert S. The Munsee Indians: A History. Civilization of the American Indian 262. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma Press, 2009, 51, 63.

Kelly, S.E. Charters of Glastonbury Abbey. Anglo-Saxon Charters 15. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012, 355–58.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, modified June 2021, s.v. coney, n.1; modified September 2020, s.v. Coney Island, n., Coney dog, n.2.

Purchase of Meadow and Upland (The Deed to Coney Island), 7 May 1654. New York City Department of Records and Information Services.

Robbins, Rossell Hope, ed. “The Flemish Insurrection.” Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries. New York: Columbia UP, 1959, lines 69–72, 11. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Harley MS 2253.

Scot, George. The Model of the Government of the Province of East-New-Jersey in America. Edinburgh: John Reid, 1685, 130. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Stiles, Henry R. The Civil, Political, Professional, and Ecclesiastical History and Commercial and Industrial Record of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, vol. 1 of 2. New York: W.W. Munsell, 1884, 187, HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Syracuse Daily Standard (New York), 6 September 1895, 6. NewspaperArchive.com.

Thomas, Carla M. “Poema Morale”: An Edition from Cambridge, Trinity College B.14.52 (Master’s Thesis). Florida State University, 2008.

Vinckeboons, Joan. Manatus Gelegen op de Noo[r]t Riuier (Manhattan Lying on the North (i.e., Hudson) River), map. 1670 copy of a 1639 map. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, Bain News Service, c.1912. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

squash

Butternut squash, Cucurbita moschata. A pile of butternut squash in a field. One squash has been sliced open to display the interior.

3 September 2021

Squash is actually two words, with two distinct etymologies. It can be a class of vegetable, the American gourds of the genus Cucurbita. Or it can be a verb meaning to squeeze, press, or crush. And from this verb comes several nouns referring to things that are squeezed, as in the drink known as lemon squash or the racket game, which uses a soft, rubber ball that can be squeezed.

The name for the vegetable comes from the Narragansett asquutasquash (raw plants that can be eaten). Asq- means raw, and -ash is a plural ending. The Narragansett word is recorded in English as early as 1634, in William Wood’s book, New Englands Prospect:

They seldome or never make bread of their Indian corne, but seeth it whole like beanes, eating three or foure cornes with a mouthfull of fish or flesh, sometimes eating meate first, and cornes after, filling chinkes with their broth. In Summer, when their corne is spent, Isquoutersquashes is their best bread, a fruite like a young Pumpion.

The clipped form squash can be seen as early as 1643, in Roger Williams’s documentation of the Narragansett language, A Key into the Language of America:

Askútasquash, their Vine aples, which the English from them call Squashes about the bignesse of Apples of severall colours, a sweet, light wholesome refreshing.

The other squash, the verb meaning to squeeze or crush, is older. It comes from the Anglo-Norman esquasser (to shatter, smash, obliterate), which is found in that language from the twelfth century. The Anglo-Norman comes from the Italian squassare, which in turn is from the Latin exquassare (to batter, weaken). The verb to quash is from the same root, but has developed as somewhat different sense in English, meaning to suppress or put down.

The verb to squash is documented by the mid sixteenth century, when Thomas Lupsette uses it in a 1542 translation of a sermon by John Chrysostom:

In these and such like thinges, men wepe and bewaile theyr wretchednes and mysfortune: and great pitie is taken of them that be in such case, and with moche lamentation they complayne, sayinge amongest them selfe: O what an hurt or losse hath he suffered; all his substaunce and goodes were sodeynly taken away. Of some other is sayd: He is extremely sycke, phisitions haue gyuen hym ouer, there is no hope in hym of lyfe.  For some other that lye in prison is great mone made: for other that be outlawed and banysshed theyr countrey. for other that be plucked into bondage from their fredome: for other that be spoyled of their ennemies, that be in thrauldome, that be throughe sea wrackes distroyed, through fyre bourned, through ruines squashed.

The verb also produced a noun, meaning something soft, that can be squeezed, and in particular an unripe, soft peapod. Shakespeare used this noun several times in his plays, the earliest being his c.1595 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in an exchange between Bottom and Peaseblossom in Act 3, Scene 1:

Bot. Your name honest Gentleman?

Peas. Pease blossome.

Bot. I pray you commend mee to mistresse Squash, your mother, and to master Peascod your father. Good master Pease-blossome, I shal desire you of more acquaintance to.

A game of squash being played in The Hague, The Netherlands. Two men with rackets on a squash court.

The game of squash, a racket sport, was invented at the English public school (i.e., private school for the Americans reading this) Harrow in the nineteenth century. It takes its name from the soft, squeezable ball used in the game. I have found the name of the game mentioned as early as 1880, but there are undoubtedly earlier uses to be found. That 1880 book is Hugh Russell at Harrow: A Sketch of School Life, but since the book is a reminiscence of school life by an adult, the school slang in it is probably a few decades older. One passage reads:

Another pastime in which he indulged a good deal was “squash-rackets.” There was a very good “squash-court” attached to the house, and whenever he could get a “place,” Russell was to be seen there.

And the book contains a glossary of Harrow slang, of which the relevant entry reads:

SQUASH—(1) Rackets played with a soft india-rubber ball.
                 (2) A “scrimmage” at football.

From Harrow, the game of squash spread to other schools.

The football, i.e., rugby, sense of the word has faded from use, but one can find it in nineteenth century sources about the game. What they called a squash is known today as a scrum.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. esquasser.

Hugh Russell at Harrow: A Sketch of School Life. London: Provost, 1880, 23, 146. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lupsette, Thomas, trans. A Sermon of Saint Chrysostome. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542, sig. A.4.v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

O’Brien, Frank Waabu. New England Algonquian Language Revival. Accessed 3 September 2021.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. squash, n.1, squash, v.1, squash, n.2, and squanter-squash, n.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, (First Folio, Brandeis University). London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 3.1, 153 (mislabeled as 151).

Williams, Roger. A Key into the Language of America. London: Gregory Dexter, 1643, 103. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Wood, William. New Englands Prospect. London: Thomas Cotes for John Bellamie, 1634, 67. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credits: Vegetable squash, George Chernilevsky, 2012, public domain image; squash game, Jens Buurgaard Nielsen, 2006, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.