Rube Goldberg

1 October 2021

An early Rube Goldberg “invention,” from 18 December 1913. “How to Open a Bottle of Beer Without an Opener.” A man holds a lighted candle under a string, causing it to break, releasing a ball that rolls through a trough, striking a hammer, which triggers a pistol, and so on through several more absurd steps, until a phonograph plays a record of a woman’s voice, and the “bottle of beer, being polite, takes off its hat.”

A Rube Goldberg device is an ingenious, overly complicated, and entirely impractical one. Reuben “Rube” Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970) was an American humorist and cartoonist famed for drawing schematics of absurdly complicated machines to perform everyday tasks. Goldberg began as a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Bulletin in 1907, and his 1908 comic strip Foolish Questions catapulted him to national celebrity in the United States. While remembered today chiefly for his cartoons, he was also a screenwriter (he wrote the Three Stooge’s first feature film, Soup to Nuts (1930)), animated filmmaker, and popular on the lecture circuit.

The adjective Goldbergian was used by humorist Robert Benchley in an August 1915 piece for the magazine Vanity Fair. But Benchley wasn’t referring to Goldberg’s machines in particular, but rather more generally to his style of verbal wit:

But hay-fever cures always come secondhand—by hearsay. Some one snuggles up to you and says “Oh, do you have hay-fever?” (to which the Goldbergian answer would be “No, I paint my nose and eyes red every day to frighten the gypsy-moths away”).

By 1920 we see the phrase Rube Goldberg type applied to academics who overly complicate things. From a tongue-in-cheek article in the 11 April 1920 Fort Worth Star-Telegram about a man who thinks he has discovered evidence of rubber tires from four million years ago:

They’re all wrong.

Nobby-headed historians and archaeologists of the Rube Goldberg type who have written weighty tomes about life, customs and handicraft of the paleolithic and neolithic ages must have been fakers.

Vehicles in the Chellean age traveled on rubber tires produced by our ancestors 4,000,000 years ago.

Yep—that’s the belief expressed by F.H. Daniels of Mena, Arkansas, in a letter to the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

And by 1928 we get Rube Goldberg as a term referring to device like those depicted in Goldberg’s cartoons. From a review of a stage show in the New York Times, 10 February 1928:

Eager to give the customers a fair return on their money, he then introduces the Fuller Construction Orchestra, which is one of those Rube Goldberg crazy mechanical elaborations for passing a modest musical impulse from a buzz saw to a soda-water siphon, on to a ferris wheel contraption, up and around, down, bang on the head of a fool triangle player, and out. Or something like that.

Goldberg died over fifty years ago, but his legacy lives on.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Atkinson, J. Brooks. “The Play: ‘Rain or Shine,’ Joe Cook.” New York Times, 10 February 1928, 26. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Benchley, Robert C. “A General Survey of Art—and Hay Fever.” Vanity Fair, 4.6, August 1915, 53. EBSCOhost Vanity Fair Magazine Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2011, modified March 2019, s.v. Rube Goldberg, n.

“Rubber Tire Only Rediscovery Thinks Arkansas Man When He Finds Ancient Tread Marks.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Texas), 11 April 1920, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Goldberg, R.L., 1913. Public domain image.

rope-a-dope

George Foreman throws a punch at Muhammad Ali, who is employing his rope-a-dope strategy during the October 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” title fight. Two boxers, one throwing a punch against the other, who is leaning against the ropes, avoiding the hit.

30 September 2021

Rope-a-dope is a boxing strategy wherein the fighter leans against the ropes, covers up with his gloves and arms, and lets the other fighter try to land effective punches. The ropes act as a kind of shock absorber, and the arms and gloves take most of the beating, leaving the fighter relatively unscathed while the opponent tires themself out with the ineffective blows. The strategy is most closely associated with the 30 October 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. Ali won by knockout in an upset after Foreman was tired from delivering ineffectual punches against Ali.

The term, however, isn’t recorded until several months after that fight. From a widely syndicated story that appeared in US newspapers on 11 May 1975:

Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali has come up with a name for the style of fighting in which he leans against the ropes and lets an opponent flail away as he did against George Foreman and Chuck Wepner.

“It’s my ‘Rope a Dope Defense,” said Ali while training Saturday for his nationally televised title fight with Ron Lyle next Friday night in the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Some claim, however, that Ali may not have come up with the term all on his own. In his 2008 memoir, My View from the Corner, famed trainer and cornerman Angelo Dundee wrote:

George Kalinsky, the official Garden photographer, clued me in as to just how seriously years later. According to George, about a month or two before the fight Ali, who was then in New York, called John F.X. Condon, publicist for the Garden, and asked if he could come over to talk. The Garden being “dark” that day, John invited Ali to come over and invited George to sit in. Suspecting that something was bothering Ali, Condon asked him what was the matter, and Ali admitted he was concerned about Foreman, saying he was “too big” and “too strong.” Remembering a photo he had taken of Ali sparring at the 5th Street Gym where he was leaning back over the ropes, far away from his sparring partner, George said, “Why don't you try something like that? Sort of a dope on the ropes, letting Foreman swing away but, like in the picture, hit nothing but air.” By the end of the meeting, George remembered, Condon had somehow changed “dope on the ropes” to “rope-a-dope."

Whether you believe the story in its entirety or not, it might give you a clue to what Ali's mind-set was like before a fight.

Kalinsky himself told essentially the same story, differing in only a few minor details, to the Wall Street Journal in 2013. This could be a case of Kalinsky misremembering or even deliberately burnishing his own legacy—he is the one, after all, who told the story to both Dundee and the Wall Street Journal. And Dundee expressed doubt about its veracity, only repeating the story to illustrate how seriously Ali was taking the upcoming fight with Foreman. And Ali was almost as good a wordsmith as he was a boxer; he was certainly capable of inventing a clever term all on his own. Finally, and most damning to Kalinsky’s story, it seems unlikely that Ali would call on a publicist and a photographer for advice on boxing strategy.

But to be fair to Kalinsky, Ali was very savvy, both as a boxer and as a self-promoter, and he was used to relying on an entourage of people around him for advice. It’s plausible that he might call upon a publicist and a photographer to help him come up with a catchy term for his new strategy—not in coming up with strategy itself, just in naming it.

Still, just as we give credit to the named author of a book and not its ghostwriter, or to a politician and not their speechwriter, we can safely give credit to Ali for rope-a-dope regardless of who thought of it. After all, he was the first to publicly utter the term.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Ali’s Style: Rope A Dope.” Asheville Citizen-Times (North Carolina) (Associated Press), 11 May 1975 2B. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Dundee, Angelo, with Bert Randolph Sugar. My View From the Corner: A Life in Boxing. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008 172. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gardner, Ralph. “Madison Square Garden’s Eye.” Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2013. ProQuest: Wall Street Journal.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, modified September 2019, s.v. rope-a-dope, n.

Photo credit: El Gráfico, 1974. Fair use of a low-resolution photograph to illustrate the topic under discussion.

---

Sources: 

Yale Book of Quotations.

roger (radio use)

Drawing of three American soldiers digging in on a beach in Sicily, 1943, while a fourth, a radio operator, works his equipment. In the background an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) disembarks soldiers, and a plume of water rises nearby from an artillery hit. Other ships are in the distant background.

29 September 2021

In radio communications worldwide, the word roger is used to acknowledge receipt of a transmission. Roger stands for “received,” but why this particular word? Especially since the word in the standard spelling alphabet uses romeo for the letter < r >.

It turns out the choice is an arbitrary one that was made back in the 1920s, with the advent of voice transmissions over radio. When pronouncing letters, as when you spell out a word, the radio transmission can be garbled or indistinct. So various groups adopted spelling alphabets (often called phonetic alphabets, although that’s something of a misnomer) for use over radio. And in 1927, the US Navy adopted a spelling alphabet that used roger for the letter < r >:

Affirmative / Baker / Cast / Dog / Easy / Fox / George / Hypo / Interrogatory / Jig / King / Love / Mike / Negative / Option / Preparatory / Quack / Roger / Sail / Tare / Unit / Vice / William / X-ray / Yoke / Zed

This particular spelling alphabet was printed the Navy’s 1927 Bluejackets’ Manual alongside the corresponding flag and Morse code symbols for the letters, a neat moment in history when the three systems—flags, Morse code, and radio—were all in widespread use for communicating at sea.

By 1939, the US Army and Navy had developed a joint spelling alphabet for use by all the branches of service:

Affirm / Baker / Cast / Dog / Easy / Fox / George / Hypo / Inter / Jig / King / Love / Move / Negat / Option / Prep / Queen / Roger / Sail / Tare / Unit / Victor / William / Xray / Yoke / Zed

Use of roger in acknowledging receipt of a transmission is recorded by 1941, when it appeared in a list of such terms prepared by the US Army’s public relations division and reprinted in the journal American Speech:

ROGER! Expression used instead of okay or right. (Air Corps)

And roger as a verb meaning to acknowledge a transmission was recorded in civil aviation by August 1946 in a story about the airline business in Fortune magazine:

A pilot, bringing a ship into a major airport recently, checked with traffic control, reported his position at a range station, flying at 7,000 feet. Control told him: “Cleared to descend to 1,500 feet.” He rogered, descended, checked in again at 1,500 feet. This time ATC ordered: “Descend to 5,000 feet.” The hair rising on his neck, the pilot said he was already at 1,500 and why did they want him to hold at 5,000. ATC told him: “Other aircraft at 4,000 feet.” He had somehow descended safely through the other traffic in the fog.

In 1956, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the military North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) adopted a spelling alphabet that dropped roger in favor of romeo. That alphabet is still in use:

Alfa / Bravo / Charlie / Delta / Echo / Foxtrot / Golf / Hotel / India / Juliet / Kilo / Lima / Mike / November / Oscar / Papa / Quebec / Romeo / Sierra / Tango / Uniform / Victor / Whiskey / X-ray / Yankee / Zulu

But despite the change, roger stayed on as the term for acknowledging messages.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Glossary of Army Slang.” American Speech, 16.3, October 1941, 168. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, modified December 2020, s.v. roger, int. (and n.3); modified December 2019, s.v. roger, v.2.

US Army. FM 24-5, Basic Field Manual Signal Communication, 1 November 1939.  Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 1939, § 181. Internet Archive.

US Navy. The Bluejackets’ Manual, seventh edition, revised (May 1927). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 1928, plates 4–6. ProQuest Congressional.

“What’s Wrong with the Airlines.” Fortune, August 1946, 192. EBSCOhost Fortune Archive.

Image credit: Unknown artist, Office of War Information, July–August 1943. Library of Congress. Public domain Image.

diaspora

An Asian man and two boys, presumably his sons, in traditional Chinese dress, walking along a street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, c.1900. Part of the Chinese diaspora.

28 September 2021

A diaspora is a dispersal of people or the collection of places where such people are dispersed. The Diaspora, with capital letters, is that of Jews throughout the ancient world, which began with the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. The word has been subsequently applied to other ethnic groups scattered outside their homelands, and even to any group that has dispersed.

The word comes from the Hellenistic Greek διασπορά (δια- “across” + σπορά “sowing”). It appears multiple times in the Septuagint, a second-to-third century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. One such appearance is Deuteronomy 28:25: “ἔση ἐν διασπορᾷ ἐν πάσαις βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς” (you shall be in diaspora in all kingdoms of the earth). It also appears several times in the Christian New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, in reference to the apostles spreading the gospel.

Diaspora makes its English debut in the closing years of the sixteenth century, in a 1594 translation of Lambert Daneau’s A Fruitfull Commentarie Upon the Twelve Small Prophets. In typical fashion for Christian theologians of the era (and for many still today), Daneau positions the Jewish Diaspora as a necessary precursor for Christian evangelism. In other words, that God’s purpose for the Jews was only as a steppingstone toward Christianity. In the commentary on Zechariah 10:9, John Stockwood translates:

Wherfore this thing sheweth the multiplying or increasing of this people: & that which otherwise might seeme most wofull, namely, to liue without the borders of their countrie, that the same shall bee both profitable and glorious for the Iewes, who by this meanes are sent forth to be as it were preachers of the glorie of God among the heathen, that they might sowe the first seedes of the grace of God, which was to be shewed toward them. This scattering abrode of the Iewes, as it were an heauenly sowing, fell out after their returne from the captiuitie of Babylon. Wherevpon both Acts.2. and also 1.Pet.1. and 1.Iam.ver.1. they are called Diaspora, that is, a scattering or sowing abrode.

Daneau’s original Latin reads “διασπορά, id est, dispersio” (diaspora, that is, dispersal).

Application of diaspora in English to groups other than the Jews dates to at least 1749, when it is applied to the Unitas Fratrum, or Union of Brothers, which is now better known as the Moravian Church, in an English translation of a Latin description of the religion. This reference is to the dispersal of Moravians to elsewhere in Europe:

Johannes à Lasco (a Polish Baron and Prelate, who, twenty years before, putting off in the mean while his Office at home, thro’ Love of Truth, had gone to foreign Countries, where he at different Times was Pastor of the Diaspora at London, Emden, Frankfort on the Mayn; but in the Year 1556. being sent for, returned into his own Country).

Again, the original Latin reads dispersis.

And by the end of the eighteenth century, diaspora was being used to describe the dispersal of non-ethnic groups. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale University, wrote in 1794 about the spread of deist philosophers and philosophy in an anti-Enlightenment screed:

In this period, of taking great liberties with the person and religion of Jesus, of conceited wisdom, of bold an illiberal invectives against revelation, during the present rage and enthusiastic mania of deism, I fear not to risque the offence and vociferous repudiations of the disciples of the open Voltaire and Rosseau, or the covert deistical Gibbon, notwithstanding their public honors in the recent apotheoses of the newly resumed ethnical idolatry, and their repositation among the collection of Gods in the motly pantheon of the Temple of Reason. The blaze of this little political diaspora of extravagant and self-opinionated philosophers (a fraternity bringing the honorable name into contempt, as it did in the fourth century) will, like other momentary lamps of error, burn down, go out and evanish.

Today, diaspora is applied to many groups, including, but not limited to, Indians, Africans, Irish, Chinese, and Armenians. And diaspora and the adjective diasporic are even applied to the English language as it is spoken and written throughout the world.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

An Account of the Doctrine, Manners, Liturgy, and Idiom of the Unitas Fratrum. London: 1749, 108. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Daneau, Lambert. Commentariorum Lamberti Danaei in Prophetas Minores, vol. 2 of 2. Geneva: Eustatius Vignon, 1586, 949. Post Reformation Digital Library.

———. A Fruitfull Commentarie Upon the Twelve Small Prophets. John Stockwood, trans. Cambridge: John Legate, 1594, 1042. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, modified June 2021, s.v. diaspora, n., modified March 2018, s.v. diasporic, adj.

Stiles, Ezra. A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I. Hartford, Connecticut: Elisha Babcock, 1794, 308–09. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo credit: Arnold Genthe, c.1900. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

ring around the rosie

Illustration accompanying the “Ring-a-ring-a-roses” rhyme in the 1881 edition of Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose. Colored drawing of six children in late nineteenth-century dress holding hands and dancing in the circle, while on a country hillside. A windmill and farm fields are in the background.

27 September 2021

Ring Around the Rosie (or Ring a Ring o’ Roses, or other variant spellings) is a children’s song and game where the children join hands, dance in a circle, sing, and at the end they all fall to the ground. Or at least that’s how the game is commonly played nowadays. The origin of the rhyme is rather straightforward; the phrase comes from May Day or Whitsunday (Pentecost) traditions of dancing and gathering garlands or wreathes of flowers, traditions that date to the medieval era. Versions of the song, and they are myriad, are found in a number of European languages, and at the end the children usually either fall down, curtsy, or choose a sweetheart.

While the flower-gathering tradition dates to the medieval era, the song itself is not nearly that old. The earliest recorded versions date to the late eighteenth century but are likely older in oral use. (Efforts to record folklore and culture of children did not begin in earnest until the nineteenth century.) In his 1883 Games and Songs of American Children, William Wells Newell claims this version was in use in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1790:

Ring a ring a rosie,
A bottle full of posie,
All the girls in our town,
Ring for little Josie.

Unfortunately, Newell does not give any evidence to support his claim of a 1790 date, but the date is a plausible one, and there is no particular reason to doubt it. For we do have a version from Germany that is recorded in a 1796 collection of folklore:

Ringe, Ringe, Reihe!
Sind der Kinder Dreie,
Sitzen auf dem Holderbusch,
Rufen alle: musch, musch, musch!
Setzt euch nieder!

(Ring-a, ring-a, row!
There are three children
Sitting in the holderbush,
All call out: musch, musch, musch!
Sit down!)

The earliest appearance in English with solid evidence is from 1855 in Ann S. Stephens’s novel The Old Homestead. The rhyme appears as the epigraph for a chapter titled, “The Festival of Roses”:

A ring—a ring of roses,
Laps full of posies;
Awake—awake!
Now come and make
A ring—a ring of roses.

And the text of that chapter explains the reason why Stephens chose the rhyme to introduce the chapter:

Among the first and the busiest were Mary Fuller and Isabel. They sat beneath a great elm tree back of the Hospital, with a heap of flowers between them, out of which they twined a world of bouquets, fairy garlands, and pretty crowns. Half-a-dozen little girls, lame, or among the convalescent sick, volunteered to gather the flowers, and some of the larger boys were up among the branches of the elm tree, garlanding them with ropes of the coarser blossoms.

[...]

Then the little girls began to seek their own amusements. They played “hide and seek,” “ring, ring a rosy," and a thousand wild and pretty games; for the place was so beautiful, and the day so bright, the little rogues quite forgot that they were in the Poor House, or had ever been sick in the whole course of their lives.

Another German version is recorded in 1857, this one from Switzerland, in Ernst Rochholz’s Alemannisches Kinderlied und Kinderspiel aus der Schweiz:

Ringel, Ringeli, Reihe,
d’ Chinde gönt i d’Maie.
sie tanzet um die Rosestöck
Und machet alle Bode-Bodehöck

(Ring-a, ring-a, row,
The babes go into the greenwood.
They dance around the rosebush
And all squat down.)

An Italian version from Venice is recorded in 1874 by Giuseppe Bernoni:

Gira, gira, rosa,
  Co la più bela in mezo;
Gira un bel giardino,
  Un altro pochetino;
Un salterelo,
  Un alto de più belo;
Una riverenza,
  Un’altra per penitenza;
Un baso a chi ti vol.

(Ring a ring a roses,
  With the most beautiful in the middle;
Ring a pretty garden,
  Another circle round,
A little skip,
  Another even better,
A curtsy,
  Another for penitence:
A kiss for the one you like.)

Kate Greenaway’s 1881 Mother Goose has this English version:

Ring-a-ring-a roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Hush! hush! hush! hush!
We’re all tumbled down.

Other English versions recorded by Newell in 1883 are:

Round the ring of roses,
Pots full of posies,
The one who stoops last
Shall tell whom she loves best.

Ring around the rosie,
Squat among the posies.
Ring around the roses,
Pocket full of posies,
One, two, three—squat!

A ring, a ring, a ransy,
Buttermilk and tansy,
Flower here and flower there,
And all—squat!

And there is this Parisian version also recorded in 1883 by E. Rolland:

A la main droite j’ai un rosier
  Qui fleurira
  Au mois de mai,
  Au mois de mai,
  Qui fleurira.
Entrez, entrez, charmante rose;
Embrassez celle que vous voudrez,
  La rose
Ou bien le rosier

(In my right hand I have a rosebush
  Who will bloom
  In May,
  In May,
  Who will bloom.
Come in, come in, lovely rose;
Kiss the one you want,
  The rose
Or the rosebush)

Finally, we get this version from 1886, recorded in Charlotte Burne’s Shropshire Folk-Lore. It is one of the first to incorporate sneezing into the song. Burne’ writes:

Ring o’ roses. A ring, moving around, till the last line, when they stand and imitate sneezing.

Chorus.    ‘A ring, a ring o’ roses,
                  A pocket-full o’ posies;
        One for Jack and one for Jim and one for little Moses!
                  A-tisha! a-tisha! a-tisha!”                  COMMON

At Edgmond, where this game is a favorite with very little children, the last line runs, “A curchey in, and a curchey out, and curchey all together,” curtseying accordingly.

The reason for my including so many versions in different languages is because of the persistent false etymology that has attached to the rhyme. According to this tale, the nursery rhyme is a cultural memory of the plague—either the one of 1660 or even the Black Death of the fourteenth century. The tale is based on the canonical present-day version of the rhyme, which reads:

Ring around the rosie
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down

Supposedly, ring around the rosie refers to buboes on the skin, a symptom of the bubonic plague. A pocket full of posies refers to flowers kept in the pocket to ward off the disease. Ashes, ashes is a reference to death, as in “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The common variant of the third line, Atishoo, atishoo, is a reference to sneezing and sickness. Finally, falling down is a representation of death.

But as we can see, this explanation does not work for the earliest known versions of the rhyme, which are clearly about picking flowers. And by focusing on one English version, the explanation ignores all the others, in all the other languages. Furthermore, the plague explanation itself doesn’t appear until the second half of the twentieth century. It is clearly an attempt to rationalize a rhyme that doesn’t make sense in our present-day culture, one where circular May Day dances are a thing of the past.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Bernoni, Giuseppe. Giuochi Poplari Veneziani (Popular Venetian Games). Venice: Tipografia Melchiorre Fontana, 1874, 30. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Burne, Charlotte Sophia, ed. Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings, part 3. London: Trübner, 1886, 511–512. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Greenaway, Kate, illus. Mother Goose. London: Frederick Warne, 1881, 52. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Newell, William Wells, ed. Games and Songs of American Children. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1883, 127–28. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Opie, Iona and Peter. The Singing Game. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988, 219–27. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, modified June 2021, s.v. ring-a-ring o’ roses, n.

Rochholz, Ernst Ludwig. Alemannisches Kinderlied und Kinderspiel aus der Schweiz (German Children’s Songs and Games from Switzerland). Leipzig: J.J. Weber, 1857, 183. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Rolland, E. Rimes et Jeux de l’Enfance (Rhymes and Childhood Games). Les Littératures Populaires 14. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1883, 71–72. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Stephens, Ann S. The Old Homestead. New York: Bunce and Brother, 1855, 213–16. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Kate Greenaway, 1881. Public domain image.