California

13 September 2021

Detail of a c.1595 map showing what is now Baja California labeled as California and the territory to its north labeled Nova Albion, the name bestowed upon the region by Francis Drake in 1579.

California is a creation of Spanish, Mexican, and American settler-colonists, and therefore, despite having a significant Indigenous population, there is no Indigenous name that corresponds to the region as we know it today. But the name California does come out of two very different colonial contexts, the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century and the literary genre of medieval romance, which looked to the east as a place to be conquered and idolized during the Crusades and through Orientalist fantasies.

The origin of the name California was a mystery for some time until the 1870s, when Edward Everett Hale rediscovered where it came from. The origin is in a literary work, famous in its day, but long since forgotten by most, the Spanish Las Sergas de Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. It was written sometime before 1505, the year of Montalvo’s death, and published posthumously. It is the fifth book in a series of medieval romances. In the first three volumes Montalvo assembled, organized, and translated a number of traditional Portuguese romances about a knight named Amadis of Gaul. The fourth volume was also about Amadis but was an original work by Montalvo. The fifth book is also original to Montalvo, but features Esplandián, Amadis’s eldest son as the main character.

In this fifth book, California is an island off the coast of Asia populated by Black Amazons and ruled by a queen named Califre:

Sabed que ala diestra mano delas Yndias ouo vna Ysla llamada California mucho llegada ala parte del parayso terrenal la qual sue poblada de mugeres negras sin que algun varon entre ellas ouiesse: qui casi como las amazonas era su estilo de biuir.

Hale translated this passage as:

Know that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very near to the Terrestrial Paradise, which was peopled with black women, without any men among them, because they were accustomed to live after the fashion of Amazons.

Where Montalvo got the name is a matter of speculation, but he likely took it from the Spanish califa (caliph), which is from the Arabic خليفة or khalîf (literally, successor, i.e., to Muhammad). Hence the connection to the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and the subject of the book being rife with Orientalist themes.

While popular in its day, the book faded from memory. It is perhaps best remembered as the first book to be burned when Don Quixote’s household destroys his library of medieval romances, believing those to be the cause of his delusions. From Cervantes’s novel:

“No,” said the niece, “there’s no reason to pardon any of them, because they all have been harmful; we ought to toss them out the windows into the courtyard, and make a pile of them and set them on fire; or better yet, take them to the corral and light the fire there, where the smoke won’t bother anybody.”

The housekeeper agreed, so great was the desire of the two women to see the death of those innocents; but the priest was not in favor of doing that without even reading the titles first. And the first one that Master Nicolás handed him was The Four Books of Amadís of Gaul, and the priest said:

“This one seems to be a mystery, because I have heard that this was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, and all the rest found their origin and inspiration here, so it seems to me that as the proponent of the doctrine of so harmful a sect, we should, without any excuses, condemn it to the flames.”

“No, Señor,” said the barber, “for I’ve also heard that it is the best of all the of this kind ever written, and as a unique example of the art, it should be pardoned.”

“That’s true,” said the priest, “and so we’ll spare its life for now. Let’s see the one next to it.”

“It is,” said the barber, “the Exploits of Esplandián, who was the legitimate son of Amadís of Gaul.”

“In truth,” said the priest, “the mercy shown the father will not help the son. Take it, Señora Housekeeper, open the window, throw it into the corral, and let it be the beginning of the pile that will fuel the fire we shall set.”

The housekeeper was very happy to do as he asked, and the good Esplandián went flying into the corral, waiting with all the patience in the world for the fire that threatened him.

As to the non-fictional California, the name was allegedly bestowed on the “island” we know call Baja California (actually a peninsula) by Hernán Cortés, although Cortés never visited the territory and documentation for his naming it is lacking. The first European to actually visit what is now Baja California was Francisco de Ulloa in 1539, who also determined it was a peninsula and not an island. A few years later in 1542, Juan Cabrillo mapped the coast of Alto California, the present-day U.S. state. Francis Drake explored the coastline further in 1579, naming it Nova Albion (New England); that name did not stick.

The name California starts appearing in English writing by 1587. From a translation of René Goulaine de Laudonnière’s A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages:

Now if the greatnes of the maine of Virginea, and the large extension thereof, especially to the West, should make you thinke that the subduing of it, were a matter of more difficultie then the conquest of Irelande, first I answere, that, as the fresh experience of that happie and singuler skilfull pilotte and Captaine M. Iohn Dauis to the northwest (towarde which his discouerie your selfe haue thrise contributed with the forwardest) hath shewed a great part to bee maine Sea, where before was thought to bee mayne lande, so for my part I am fully perswaded by Orielius late reformation of Culuacan and the gulfe of California that the land on the backe part of Virginea extendeth nothing so farre westward as is put downe in the mappes of those partes.

Both Alto and Baja California passed from Spain to Mexico in 1821, and the United States acquired Alto California (i.e., the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico) in 1848 as a result of the Mexican-American War. What is now the state of California was admitted to the Union in 1850 following the discovery of gold there in 1848.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Cervantes, Miguel, de. Don Quixote. Edith Grossman, trans. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, First Part, Chapter 6, 46.

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

Hale, Edward Everett. “The Queen of California.” His Level Best, and Other Stories. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872, 238. Google Books.

Laudonnière, René Goulaine de. A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes vnto Florida. London: Thomas Dawson, 1587, 7. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Montalvo, Garci Rodriguez de. Las Sergas de Esplandian. 1526. Chapter 157, fol. 108v. Google Books.

Image credit: Hondius, Jodocus. Vera Totius Expeditionis Nauticae: Descriptio D. Franc. Draci, c.1595. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

Yankee

8 September 2021

[Updated 11 September 2021. Added reference to the 1728 letter about Jonathan “Yankey” Hastings and the 1767 antedating of the song Yankee Doodle.]

Cartoon titled, British Valour and Yankee Boasting or, Shannon vs. Chesapeake. The cartoon depicts the capture of the USS Chesapeake by the HMS Shannon in Boston Harbor on 1 June 1813. It shows a British boarding party routing and throwing overboard the crew of the Chesapeake, depicted as hapless and cowardly, while ashore in Boston a dinner party awaits the return of the crew who are not coming.

A Yankee is an American, or more specifically an American from one of the northern states, or even more specifically, a New Englander. The origin of Yankee is uncertain, but the most plausible explanation is that it is a variation on Janke, a diminutive of the Dutch Jan (John). Presumably, the name was reasonably common among Dutch settlers in the Hudson River valley, and from there became attached to anyone from that part of North America. The evidence for this hypothesis is fascinating in its own right, but it is a bit thin, hence the label of plausible. What is clear, is that the epithet Yankee was in common use by the 1760s.

Yankey, variously spelled, was used as a nickname and perhaps as a surname. For instance, there was a pirate/privateer who went by that name, his real name being perhaps Jan Willems (John Williams). William Dampier, in his A New Voyage Round the World, refers to him while relating events that occurred in 1681:

Capt. Yankes a Barco-longo 4 Guns, about 60 Men, English, Dutch, and French; himself a Dutchman.

(Barco-longo is a type of small, fishing boat. Barcalounger is a brand of reclining chair. It’s amusing to think of a pirate in a Barcalounger, but alas, that’s not the case here.)

And Dampier further says of him:

At the Rio Grande Captain Wright demanded the Prize as his due by virtue of his Commission: Captain Yanky said it was his due by the Law of Privateers. Indeed Captain Wright had the most right to her, having by his Commission protected Captain Yanky from the French, who would have turned him out because he had no Commission; and he likewise began to engage her first But the Company were all afraid that Captain Wright would presently carry her into a Port; therefore most of Captain Wright's Men stuck to Captain Yanky, and Captain Wright losing his Prize, burned his own Bark, and had Captain Yankys's, it being bigger than his own; the Tartan was sold to a Jamaica Trader, and Captain Yanky commanded the Prize Ship.

The pirate Yankey is also mentioned in a series of British government dispatches in the 1680s, sometimes as a pirate, when he was attacking British ships, and sometimes as a privateer, when he was going after the Spanish. One such is a dispatch from Jamaica dated 26 July 1683:

The other pirates, however, made them unite; and so about the middle of May (as I judge) they sailed from Bonaco, a little island in the Bay of Honduras, with seven or eight ships, five or six barques, and twelve hundred men; chief commanders, Vanhorn, Laurens, and Yankey Duch—no English, except one Spurre, and Jacob Hall in a small brig from Carolina. With this force (having hardly agreed who should command in chief) they came, at the latter end of May, on the coast of Vera Cruz, and then put eight hundred men into Yankey's and another ship. These approached the coast, and, by a mistake as fatal as that of Honduras, were taken by the Spaniards ashore for two of the flota. They lit fires to pilot them in without sending to find out who they were, and thus the pirates landed in the night but two miles from the town. By daybreak they came into it, took two forts of twelve and sixteen guns, finding soldiers and sentinels asleep, and all the people in the houses as quiet and still as if in their graves. They wakened them by breaking open their doors, and then a few gentlemen appeared with swords but immediately fled. So the pirates had the quiet possession and plundering of churches, houses and convents for three days, and not finding gold and silver enough they threatened to burn the great church and all the prisoners, who were six thousand in number.

And an order for his arrest was issued on 23 November 1684:

Instructions from Colonel Hender Molesworth to Captain Mitchell, RN, H.M.S. Ruby. You will forthwith sail to Petit Guavos and deliver my letter to the Governor, demanding satisfaction for a sloop of this island unlawfully seized by Captain Yankey. If the Governor justifies Yankey, you will protest against the injustice of the proceedings. If he seems to admit the illegality of the proceedings of the privateers you will consider Yankey as a pirate and tell the Governor that you will treat him as such. But if he lay the blame on the Intendant of Martinique we must carry our complaint elsewhere. If you meet with Yankey on your way you will endeavour to seize him and carry him with you to Petit Guavos. If the Governor justifies him you will deliver Yankey to him; if not, you will bring Yankey here for trial. You will demand delivery of all English subjects engaged in privateering, but not compel it by force.

A dispatch from the Duke of Albemarle to the Earl of Dartmouth, from Jamaica of 8 March 1687/68 tells of Yankey and another pirate attacking a Spanish town:

Yesterday had news that the pirates Yanky and Jacobs had with 84 men fallen upon the storehouses in the bottom of the Bay of Honduras, and that three Spanish men of war came and blocked them up, and landed what men they could to join with the country, who made up the number of 700 men, and raised three breast works, which works were attacked by the pirates and by them taken, killing a great number on the spot and routing the rest, they losing only nine men, and Yanky wounded. The pirates are now in the Bay of Honduras recruiting, intending to fall upon the Spanish ships, one Jones, another pirate, having a ship of force, being joined with them.

And a dispatch from later that year, on 24 October 1687, mentioned him again:

Lieutenant Governor Molesworth to William Blathwayt. Yankey and Jacob could not digest my conditions that their vessels should be broken up, though the majority of his people were for it.

And that dispatch contained an enclosure that identified Yankey by his real, presumably Anglicized, name. It’s not clear whether the parenthetical names are in the original or if they were added for clarity by the editor when the papers were published in the nineteenth century:

Captains John Williams (Yankey) and Jacob Everson (Jacob) to Lieutenant Governor Molesworth. We have suffered much from calms and storms, and have only arrived after much distress off Point Negril. We beg you to consider that if our ships are broken up we shall be left destitute of all livelihood in present and future, and to allow us the use of them. We have neither of us money to purchase an estate ashore. I shall work into Bluefields and thence to Port Royal, but we are deserted by most of our men, and have none but raw hands left, so are afraid to stand close inshore for land winds. Signed, John Williams, Jacob Everson.

There is also a record from 1725 of an enslaved, Black man named Yankee:

YANKEE.—The inventory of the effects of William Marr, formerly of Morpeth, and afterwards “of Carolina, in parts beyond the seas, but in the parish of St. Dunstan, Stepney” (1725), ends with “Item one negroe man named Yankee to be sold.” Mr. W. Woodman, of Morpeth, has the document.

A few years later, we have mention of a Massachusetts farmer, Jonathan Hastings, who is nicknamed Yankey. It’s in a letter from 27 September 1728. Unfortunately, the letter, if it survives, is buried in an unknown archive somewhere, but we do have a 1795 attestation in Massachusetts Magazine to its contents:

One of these letters, dated “Cambridge. Sept. 27, 1728,” the editor has before him. It is a most humourous narrative of the fate of a goose roasted at “Yankey Hastings’s” and it concluds [sic] with a poem on the occasion, in the mock heroic.

So, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Yankee was used as a name or nickname for several individuals.

And the novel The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, serialized in the British Magazine in 1760 uses yanky in the sense of a Dutch ship or boat:

Haul forward thy chair again, take thy berth, and proceed with they story in a direct course, without yawing like a Dutch yanky.

But the earliest attestation of Yankee as a generic term for an American comes two years earlier in a letter of 19 June 1758 by Major General James Wolfe to his commander, Field Marshal Jeffrey Amherst during the French and Indian (Seven Years’) War:

My posts are now so fortified that I can afford you the two companies of Yankees, and the more as they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance.

We see it again in 1765 in Oppression. A Poem by an American. With Notes by a North Briton:

From meanness first, this Portsmouth Yankey rose,
And still to meanness, all his conduct flows.

The note to these lines reads:

“Portsmouth Yankey,” It seems, our hero being a New-Englander by birth, has a right to the epithet of Yankey; a name of derision, I have been informed, given by the Southern people on the Continent, to those of New-England: what meaning there is in the word, I never could learn.

The first known mention of the song Yankee Doodle comes in a 1767 musical play, The Disappointment, by Andrew Barton. The lyrics are not those familiar to us today, but it’s clear that by this date the song was well known. Musical plays of this period featured popular songs of the day, as opposed to tunes composed for the plays, and this one is no different:

Raccoon sings.
AIR IV Yankee Doodle.
O! how joyful shall I be,
   When I get de money,
I will bring it all to dee;
   O! my diddling honey.
(Exit, singing they chorus, yankee doodle, &c.[)]

And the next year we get another mention of the song, showing that by this point the name was quite common indeed. From a news article about the arrival of a British fleet in Boston, Massachusetts on 29 September 1768:

The fleet was brought to anchor near Castle-William; that evening there was throwing of skyrockets, &c. and those passing boats observed great rejoicings, and that the yanky dudle song was the capital piece in their band of music.

There is a story that Yankee Doodle was composed by a British army surgeon in 1755, but while the story is oft-repeated, sometimes credulously in otherwise reputable sources, there is no evidence to support it.

(I’m not going to delve further into the history of the song, but if you want more, see Oscar Sonneck’s 1909 report on it for the Library of Congress. The source is old, and there may be further evidence that has come to light since, but it’s superbly researched.)

A number of other etymologies for Yankee have been proffered over the years, none with any good evidence, but which also cannot be conclusively disproven. One of these explanations is that of Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, who claimed Yankee came from Yengees, as that is how certain Indigenous peoples pronounced English:

In New England, they at first endeavoured to imitate the sound of the national name of the English, which they pronounced Yengees.

And:

These were the names which the Indians gave to the whites, until the middle of the Revolutionary war, when they were reduced to the following three:

1. Mechanschican or Chanschican (long knives). This they no longer applied to the Virginians exclusively, but also to those of the people of the middle states, whom they considered as hostilely inclined towards them, particularly those who wore swords, dirks, or knives at their sides.

2. Yengees. This name they now exclusively applied to the people of New England, who, indeed, appeared to have adopted it, and were, as they still are, generally through the country called Yankees, which is evidently the same name with a trifling alteration. They say they know the Yengees, and can distinguish them by their dress and personal appearance, and that they were considered as less cruel than the Virginians or long knives. The proper English they [i.e., “the Chippeways and some other nations”] call Saggenash.

3. Quaekels. They do not now apply this name exclusively to the members of the Society of Friends, but to all the white people whom they love or respect, and whom they believe to have good intentions towards them.

Of course, the Indigenous Yengees could have come from Yankee/Janke just as easily as from the word English.

Another explanation, this one unlikely, is that Yankee comes from the Cherokee eankke, meaning slave or coward. This one was proffered by Thomas Anburey, a British officer during the American Revolution, in 1777:

The lower class of these Yankees—a propos, it may not be amiss here just to observe to you the etymology of this term: it is derived from a Cherokee word, eankke, which signifies coward and slave. This epithet of yankee was bestowed upon the inhabitants of New England by the Virginians, for not assisting them in a war with the Cherokees, and they have always been held in derision by it.

Presumably the said war was the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1758–61, but if so, it does not square with Wolfe’s casual use of the epithet in 1758. So, this last one seems highly unlikely.

That leaves us with the Dutch Janke as the most likely, and the most colorful, explanation for the origin of Yankee.

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Sources:

Anburey, Thomas. “Letter 46, 25 November 1777.” Travels Through the Interior Parts of America, vol. 2. London: William Lane, 1789, 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Barton, Andrew. The Disappointment: or, the Force of Credulity. New York: 1767 22. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

“Certificate Respecting the Rev. John Seccombe.” Massachusetts Magazine, 7.5, August 1795, 301–02. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.

Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World. London: James Knapton, 1697, 26, 45. Early English Books Online (EEBO),

Fortescue, J.W., ed. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1681–1685. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1898, 457, 733. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1685–1688. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1899, 456. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Heckewelder, John. An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1819, 142–44. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, chapter 3.  The British Magazine, March 1760, 125. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth. Historical Manuscripts Commission, eleventh report, appendix, part 5. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1887, 136. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oppression. A Poem by an American. With Notes by a North Briton. London: C. Moran, 1765, 17. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Yankee, n. and adj., yanky, n., Yengees, n., Yankee Doodle, n.

The Repository: or, Half-Yearly Register. Containing Whatever is Remarkable in the History, Politics, Literature and Amusements, of the Year 1768. London: T. Becket, et al. 1769, 36. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Sonneck, Oscar George Theodore. Report on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” “America,” “Yankee Doodle.” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wolfe, James. Letter, 19 June 1758. In Willson, Beckles. The Life and Letters of James Wolfe. London: William Heinemann, 1909. 376. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Yankee.” Notes and Queries, s5-X.259, 14 December 1878, 467.

Image credit: George Cruikshank, 1813. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

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.