Sam Hill

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Canto 15 of Dante’s Inferno, where Brunetto Latini accosts Dante, while Virgil, Dante’s guide, looks on. Black and white image of a hellscape, raining fire and brimstone, where a naked man accosts a laurel-wreathed man, while another laurel-wreathed man watches. Around the three central figures are naked, suffering men.

11 October 2021

Sam Hill is a North American euphemism for hell or the devil. The origin is not known for certain, but it is most likely just a variation on the word hell, with a bit of personification of the devil thrown in for good measure, ala the names Old Nick, Ned, or Scratch. The phrase seems to have arisen in the 1820s.

The earliest use of Sam Hill that I have found is in a letter to the Providence, Rhode Island Independent Inquirer that was published on 12 February 1830. The letter is allegedly written by a Frenchman named Jean-Jacques Grenouille asking about the origin of the phrase. The letter and Monsieur Grenouille, himself, are almost certainly fictions invented by the paper’s editor. But even though it’s fictional, the letter shows that Sam Hill was in common use at the time—its use seems to have been something of a fad—but also was probably a relatively recent coinage. The letter reads in part:

When I walk on the deck, I see one sailor man have one wheel, which he turn round first au droit, to the right, then turn him to the left, and I speak him, “Why for what you so moch labor always?”—and he say, “Sair, the dam ship steer like Sam Hill.” Well I not can understand, and then I go down in my chamber cabin, and I look in [line indistinct] not find Sam, but I ask the captain, and he laugh and say, “Sam one man’s name;” so I look and find Hill, one little mountain, but still I not understand what was Sam Hill.

Well, in three four day more, one night, the ship rock very moch, and the captain ask our officier, “What wether is on deck?” and he say, “it blow like Sam Hill.” Some four day more the ship go in New-York, and I walk on the land and stay for short time, and then I go in one batiment de vapeur, one steam-boat, and go at Providence. By and by one man what was not never been before in one steam-boat, he was look in the water, and he say, “I snum, she foam at the mouth like Sam Hill!” Ma foi! more Sam Hill.

[...]

Monsieur le Prentair, if you can discover what is Sam Hill, or any of your correspondent, will you make me oblige in write one letter to me?

The elided section contains many more instances of the writer encountering people, from all strata of American society, using the phrase Sam Hill.

Another plausible explanation for Sam Hill was proffered by A.E. Sokol in a 1940 article in the journal American Speech. Sokol points out that Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz premiered in America in 1825, the first Continental opera to play in the States. That opera features a demon named Samiel, and Sokol suggested that Sam Hill is a variation on that name. Samiel could easily become Sam Hill, and the dates work—at least until someone unearths a use that antedates 1825—but Occam’s razor suggests that a variation on hell is a more parsimonious explanation.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. sam hill, n.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. Sam Hill, n.

Grenouille, Jean-Jacques. Letter. Independent Inquirer (Providence, Rhode Island), 12 February 1830, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. (The database’s metadata is incorrect, giving an 1829 date, so use that year if you search for this source.)

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Sam Hill, n.

Sokol, A.E. “What the Sam Hill?” American Speech, 15.1, February 1940, 106–09. JSTOR.

Image credit: Gustave Doré, 1861. Public domain image.

werewolf

8 October 2021

Woodcut, c. 1685. Three men, armed with clubs and a pitchfork, drive a wolf into well. On the left, of the scene the wolf, dressed in human clothing, is hung. In the background are the villages of Neuses and Eschenbach. The German caption reads: “Great Incident! With an outlawed wolf, who in 1685 in the Margraviate of Ansbach carried away and ate a number of children, was finally caught in a well on 9 October at Neuses near Eschenbach, and later hung.”

As most people know, a werewolf is a fictional monster, a person who changes into a wolf. In the most common English-language form of the legend, this transformation takes place at the full moon. Werewolf is a word with a very straightforward etymology, but with some interesting side notes. It is a compound of the Old English words wer (man) + wulf (wolf). So, a werewolf is literally a man-wolf. (Cf. man / woman / wife.)

But the word appears either only once or three times in the extant Old English corpus, depending on how you count it. The three passages in which it appears are by the same writer, repeated three times with slightly different wording/scribal variations. The writer is, coincidentally, Wulfstan (literally “wolf-stone”), the archbishop of York. In his writing, Wulfstan liked to play with the word wulf, and he doesn’t use werewolf in the sense we’re familiar with today. He uses it as a metaphor for Satan, a “wolf” that preys on humans. The passage as it appears in the first law code of Cnut (c.1020) reads as follows:

Þonne moton þa hyrdas beon swyðe wacore & geornlice clypigende, þe wið þone þeodsceaðan folce sceolan scyldan: þæt syndan bisceopas & mæssepreostas, þe godcunde heorda bewarian & bewerian sceolan mid wislican laran, þæt se wod freca werewulf to swyðe ne slite, ne to fela ne abite of godcunde heorde.

(Thus, the shepherds, who must protect the people against this ravager of the people must be very vigilant and zealously cry out: these are the bishops and priests who must defend and protect the divine flock with wise teaching, so that the mad, gluttonous werewolf does not rend nor bite too many of the divine flock.)

The Consiliatio Cnuti, a twelfth-century translation of Cnut’s law code into Latin, uses the word virlupus (literally man-wolf), which is a nonce calque of the English.

Given that Wulfstan’s uses of the word are in a different sense than that of the legendary monster, and that they are isolated by several centuries from the next uses of the word, later uses of the word to mean a lycanthrope may represent an independent coinage. When werewolf reappears in the late twelfth century, wer was still in common use and could produce compounds.

Werewolf stories became extremely popular in England at that time. The most famous is probably Marie de France’s lai of Bisclavret, written in the late twelfth / early thirteenth century. Marie wrote in Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken by the English nobility at the time. Bisclavret opens with the lines:

Quant de lais faire m’entrement,
Ne voil ublier Bisclaveret.
Bisclaveret ad nun en bretan,
Garwaf l’apelent li Norman.

(Since I have undertaken to compose lais,
I don’t want to forget Bisclavret.
Bisclavret is the name in Breton;
the Normans call it Garwaf.

Garwaf and its variant spellings, which are found elsewhere in the lai, do not appear in Anglo-Norman other than in this text. Garwaf appears to be an Anglo-French speaker’s pronunciation of the English werewolf.

But while garwaf or variations thereof do not appear in French, there is one instance in Latin that refers to the French word. In c.1212, around the same time Marie de France was writing, Gervase of Tilbury, an Englishman, wrote Otia Imperialia (Recreation for the Emperor) for the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV. It is a book of marvels and includes the following passage:

Vidimus enim frequenter in Anglia, per lunationes homines in lupos mutari, quod hominum genus gerulfos Galli nominant, Angli vero Werewlf, dicunt. Were enim Anglice virum sonat, Wlf lupum.

(For we have often seen in England that men are changed into wolves by the phases of the moon, that type of men the French name gerulfos, the English, in truth, call werewolf. For in English were expresses virum, wolf lupum.)

This is the only known appearance of gerulfus in a Latin text, and would seem to be another instance of garwaf, this time by an Englishman Latinizing the Anglo-Norman word with its Francophone pronunciation of the English werewolf. Normally we speak of English borrowing words from Anglo-Norman, but werewolf is a case of the transfer going in the other direction.

One last note, in medieval usage werewolf could also mean a man-eating wolf. We see that use in The Master of Game, a book about hunting written c.1410 and found in several manuscripts, the preferred one being London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.12:

Ther ben some that eten children or men and ete noon oþere flessh fro þe tyme þat þei be acherned with mennys flessh, for rather þei wolde be dede, and þei ben cleped werwolfes for men shuld be “ware” of hem.

(There are some that eat children or men and eat no other flesh after the time when they are blooded with men’s flesh, for they would rather be dead, and they are called werewolves because men should be “wary” of them.)

From this passage, it would seem that by the early fifteenth century the first element in the compound, wer, was no longer understood, and the false etymology of a wolf to be wary of had developed. It seems the practice of making up plausible sounding folk etymologies is not just a modern one.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. werewolf, n.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008, s.v. garulf.

Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, 2009.

Gervase of Tilbury. “Otia Imperialia.” In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. Scriptores rerum Bunsvicensium. Hannover: Förster, 1707, 895. Google Books.

Libermann, Felix. Die Gesetze Der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903. 1 Cnut § 26.3 (c.1020), 306–307. London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.1, fols. 3r–41r.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. wer-wolf, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. werewolf, n.

Waters, Claire M. “Bisclavret.” The Lais of Marie de France. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2018, 144–45. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wulfstan. Old English Legal Writings: Wulfstan. Andrew Rabin, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 66. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2020, 252–53.

Image credit: Unknown artist, c.1685. Public domain image.

salad / salad days

7 October 2021

A recipe for salad set down by the chief cook for King Richard II of England, c.1390. The recipe, transcribed below, follows the rubricated word Salat.

Salads actually take their name from the dressing, not the primary components. Salad comes from the Old French salade, whose root is from the Latin sal, or salt—the name is from the seasonings applied to the primary ingredients.

Salad makes its English debut toward the end of the fourteenth century. The oldest known recipe for a salad is one used by c.1390 by the master cook of Richard II of England, found in a collection of medieval recipes with the title The Forme of Cury. The manuscript in which it’s found dates to c.1425:

Salat.
Take persel, sawge, garlec, chibolles, onyouns, leek, borage, myntes, porrettes, fenel and toun cressis, rew, rosemarye, purslarye, laue, and waische hem clene, pike hem, pluk hem small wiþ þyn honde and myng hem well with rawe oile. Lay on vyneger and salt. And serue it forth.

(Salad. Take parsley, sage, garlic, scallions, onions, leek, borage mints, young leeks, fennel, and garden cresses, rue, rosemary, pusrlane, lave and wash them clean, pick them, pluck them into small pieces with your hand, and mix them well with raw oil. Lay on vinegar and salt. And serve it forth.)

The phrase salad days is a play on the metaphor of green symbolizing young plant growth, and the phrase originally meant youth and naivete. The origin of this one is quite straightforward. It’s from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene 5, in which Cleopatra chalks up her past statements of love for Julius Caesar as indiscretions of her youth, or salad days:

Alex. I, Madam, twenty seuerall Messengers.
Why do you send so thicke?

Cleo. Who’s borne that day, when I forget to send to Anthonie, shall dye a begger. Inke and paper Charmian. Welcome my good Alexas. Did I Charmian, euer loue Cæsar so?

Char. O that braue Cæsar!

Cleo. Be choak’d with such another Emphasis,
Say the braue Anthony.

Char. The valiant Cæsar.

Cleo. By Isis, I will giue thee bloody teeth,
If thou with Cæsar Parago nagaine [sic]:
My man of men.

Char. By your most gracious pardon,
I sing but after you.

Cleo. My sallad dayes,
When I was greene in iudgment, cold in blood,
To say, as I saide then. But come, away,
Get me Inke and Paper,
he shall haue euery day a seuerall greeting, or Ile vnpeople Egypt.

Parago nagaine is a printing error in the First Folio. The line should read Paragon againe.

But in recent decades, the phrase has shifted in meaning, referring instead to a period when a person was in their prime, at the peak of their abilities. For instance, the following headline appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 2 March 1970 over an article about how recruitment for the US Army Reserve was past its peak:

Salad Days Over for Army’s Reserve
Draft Lottery, Manpower Cuts Shrink Waiting Lists

Salad days being over, we’ve all been there.

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Sources:

The Forme of Cury. London: J. Nichols, 1780, 41–42. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Add. MS 5016, fol. 6r.

Freeman, Jan. “Salad Says Aren’t What They Used to Be.” Boston Globe, 15 April 2001, third edition, D5. ProQuest.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. salad, n.

Rawitch, Robert. “Salad Days Over for Army’s Reserve.” Los Angeles Times, 2 March 1970, B1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, 1.5. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (First Folio, Brandeis University). London: Isaac Jaggrd and Edward Blount, 1623, 344–45.

Image credit: London, British Library, Add. MS 5016, fol. 6r. Public domain image as a brief section of a mechanical reproduction of a work in the public domain.

sabotage

An Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) stickerette or “silent agitator” from 1915. A drawing of a wooden shoe crushing a top-hatted capitalist, coins spilling out of his pockets. In the background are silhouettes of industrial buildings. The IWW logo is above, shining like the sun. The caption is quotation from IWW official W.D. Haywood, “Sabotage means to push back, pull out or break off the fangs of Capitalism.”

6 October 2021

Sabotage, as one might guess from the word’s ending, is a borrowing from French, and that borrowing occurred in the opening years of the twentieth century. The root, sabot, literally means a wooden shoe or clog. The route from shoe to malicious damage is not clear on its face and has spawned at least one myth regarding the origin of the latter meaning, but when one looks at the use of the word in French, how it came to mean malicious damage becomes clear.

In addition to the sense of a shoe, the French word became associated with shoddy workmanship, with bungling on the job. Here’s a series of entries from a 1906 French-English dictionary:

sabot sa´bo m. sabot, wooden shoe; horse’s hoof; clog, turban-shell; socket (of furniture); child’s top; wretched fiddle; (of ships) old tub; dormir comme un sabot, sleep like a top.

sabotage sabɔ´ta:ʒ m. manufacture of wooden shoes.

saboter sabɔ´te intr. spin a top; clatter with one’s shoes; turn out poor work. — tr. bungle, make a botch of.

saboteur sabɔ´tə:r m. bungler.

The association with bungling comes from the fact that sabots were primarily worn by agricultural workers and may stem from the idea that when such workers came to the city and manufacturing jobs, they were unskilled and tended to produce shoddy products. Alternatively, it could come from the more straightforward, but still stereotypical, association with rural yokels being foolish and inept.

In the hands of the burgeoning labor movement of the era, however, sabotage, meaning a bungled job, took on a more deliberate connotation. Workers would deliberately bungle as form of labor protest. The word first appears in English in this sense in labor and socialist publications. The following, which appears in the Daily People of 15 July 1906, describes the tactics of the French labor unionists:

No useless riots in the streets; the old romantic Blanquist tactics are forgotten, but the use of what they name “action direct” (direct action), which I will try to describe as follows:

First—In case of strike—use violent picketing, knock down scabs, and go as far as burning down the shop. (In Fresseneville they burnt down the shop and the house of the boass, who had a narrow escape in an automobile). If the scabs, when going to work, are protected by soldiers, they did not bother about picketing, and went to the houses of the scabs and “saw” them there.

Second—In case of work—use “sabotage”: I try to translate that word as “go-canny.” For instance, bakery workers threatened to put ovens out of use by pouring petroleum on the dead-plate. This (does not poison the bread, but it makes bread ill-smelling). Ways of using “sabotage” are countless: when properly used, they will be terrible and deadly weapons.

There are two things of note here. First, the word has not yet been Anglicized; it appears in quotation marks, a definition is given, and it is being used in the context of France. Second, sabotage is not being used in the current sense of malicious damage—that would be the actions described in the first case. Rather, it is being used in the sense of sly and inventive means to produce shoddy products.

But within a few years sabotage would become fully Anglicized and integrated into English. The Coal Trade Bulletin of September 1914, for example, uses both sabotage and direct action, seen and defined in the above quotation, as English words without need of explanation. The WF of M is the Western Federation of Miners, and the IWW is the Industrial Workers of the World, a.k.a. the Wobblies, a more radical, general union that favored direct action:

All because a large number of misguided dupes listened and were led astray by the ideas of a few impossibilists who wanted nothing else than the opportunity of ruling the W.F. of M. and then turning them over to that aggregation of self-appointed labor saviors who preach direct action (except where it’s on syndicalism), sabotage, etc., the I.W.W.

And the verb to sabotage is recorded a few years later. Here it is in an article from the Nottingham Evening Post of 15 August 1918 about the impending collapse of Germany in the closing days of WWI. It is also being used in a more general, metaphorical sense, rather than the specific sense of destruction of property:

The newspaper mentioned [i.e., the National Zeitung (Berne)] understands that the German disaster has unpleasantly surprised official Austrian circles and caused consternation among the population. “The Austrian social organisation is bankrupt, and the war is being sabotaged,” adds this newspaper.

The aforementioned myth is that sabotage comes from protesting workers throwing their wooden shoes into machinery, thereby damaging the equipment and halting production. The myth is an old one, but got a boost in 1991 when it was repeated in the movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. But tossing shoes in the gears, as we have seen, is not the phrase’s origin. The actual origin, at least in my opinion, is one of the many cases where the real origin is more interesting than the mythical one.

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Sources:

“The Coming Collapse of Germany.” Nottingham Evening Post (England), 15 August 1918, 1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Bruckere, A. “The French Labor Movement.” Daily People (New York), 15 July 1906, 4. Readex: America’s Historic Newspapers.

International French-English and English-French Dictionary. New York: Hinds, Hayden and Eldridge, 1906, 541. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Online Etymology Dictionary, 2021, s.v. sabotage, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sabotage, n., sabot, n.

“United Mine Workers’ Delegates Report on Convention of Western Federation of Miners.” Coal Trade Bulletin, 31.7, 1 September 1914, 24. Gale Primary Sources: Archives Unbound.

Image credit: Unknown artist. Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), 1915. Public domain image.

sabbatical

5 October 2021

Sabbath is from the Latin sabbatum, which in turn comes via Greek from the Hebrew שַׁבָּת (sabbat), from a root meaning ceasing to work, rest. According to Genesis 2:2–3, after creating the universe in six days, God rested on the seventh. In Exodus 10:8–11, the Ten Commandments order the seventh day of the week to be one of rest. Furthermore, Leviticus 25:1–7 commands that every seventh year be a sabbatical year, in which fields are to lie fallow and most agricultural activity must cease. The weekly sabbath has been scrupulously observed by Jews over the centuries, but the rule on sabbatical years seems to have been inconsistently enforced over the centuries.

While the word sabbath can be found in Old English, the English adjective sabbatical appears much later than one might expect, in the late sixteenth century. In his 1599 A New Treatise of the Right Reckoning of Yeares, Robert Pont refers to the sabbatical years:

That this yeare of Christ, 1600. by right reckoning, is neither a Sabbaticall yeare, nor yet a yeare of Iubilee: and that the true Iubilee of Christianes is alreadie accomplished: with detection of the abuse of the counterfaited Iubilees holden at Rome.

And we see the adjective applied in relation to the weekly observance in Joseph Beaumont’s 1648 poem Psyche: or Loves Mysterie:

Thus the Sabbatick Fount, which all the Week
Keeps close at home, and lets no Drop spurt out;
Exactly watches and attends the Break
Of the seav'nth Day; and then, as quick as thought
     Poures out its Flood, and sacrifices all
     Its Plenty to that holy Festivall.

Starting in the nineteenth century, sabbatical began to be applied in an expanded sense, referring to a year of research and reflection after six years of work. It was first used this way among the clergy, where ministers would get a year free of pastoral duties in order to study and prepare for the next six years of preaching. We see evidence of this practice as early as 1828 in a letter written by Edward Irving, a Scottish minister:

Next Sabbath is the first of my Sabbatical year. God grant it may be a year of free-will fruitfulness!

Later in the century, universities began adopting a sabbatical system for their faculty, whereby professors would be granted one year off in seven in order to conduct research free of teaching or administrative duties. Harvard University was the first, at least in North America, to implement a sabbatical system for leaves of absence, although it did not use the term sabbatical at the outset. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, wrote in his annual report dated 7 January 1881:

For some years previous to 1869, the practice had been to grant occasional leave of absence, the professor selecting and paying his substitute, but receiving his usual salary. This practice have given rise to serious complaints, and being obviously open to grave objections, the Corporation went to the opposite extreme, and enacted that whenever a professor had leave of absence his salary should stop altogether. Being now satisfied that a more liberal policy will be as much for the interest of the University as for the advantage of the professors, the Corporation have decided that they will grant occasional leave of absence for one year on half-pay, provided that no professor have such leave oftener than once in seven years; that the applications in any one year be reasonable in number, and properly distributed among the different departments; and that the object of the professor in asking leave of absence be health, rest, study, or the prosecution of original work in literature or science.

Cornell University and Wellesley College followed suit in 1886, implementing similar systems. The earliest use of sabbatical in reference to such a system regards Wellesley’s in 1886:

THE SABBATICAL GRANT, adopted by Harvard College, provides that the professors and assistant professors of the permanent staff of instructors may once in seven years be relieved from academic duty for the period of one year, with their half-salaries continued to them. This gives them opportunity to rest or travel or engage in congenial occupation at home. The result is not wholly satisfactory.

Since then, the time period has become variable, if sabbaticals are granted at all. And some private corporations grant employees sabbatical leave at reduced or no pay from time to time.

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Sources:

Beaumont, Joseph. Psyche: or Loves Mysterie. London: John Dawson, 1648, 10.320, 179. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Eels, Walter Crosby. “The Origin and Early History of Sabbatical Leave.” AAUP Bulletin, 48.3, September 1962, 253–56.

Eliot, Charles W. “President’s Report for 1879–80,” 7 January 1881. Annual Reports of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College. 1879–80. Cambridge: UP, John Wilson and Son, 1880, 19–20. Harvard & Radcliffe Annual Reports. [Note the report is signed as of 7 January 1881, but the publication date is given as 1880.]

Irving, Edward. Letter, 19 July 1828. In Oliphant, Margaret. The Life of Edward Irving, vol. 2 of 2. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1862, 35. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sabbatical, adj. and n., sabbatic, adj. and n., sabbath, n.

Pont, Robert. A New Treatise of the Right Reckoning of Yeares. Edinburgh: Robert Walde-Grave, 1599, 2. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

 “System of Pensions.” Library Festival at Wellesley College. Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1886, 23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.