screw the pooch / fuck the dog

One of the last images of Liberty Bell 7 (Mercury-Redstone 4) before it sank beneath the waves on 21 July 1961. The capsule sank when the explosive bolts on its hatch blew prematurely. At the time, many blamed Astronaut Gus Grissom for screwing the pooch on this, the second US crewed spaceflight, but more recent evidence has shown it was a mechanical malfunction, not Grissom, that resulted in the capsule’s loss. The capsule was recovered from the ocean floor in 1999.

18 October 2021

Screw the pooch was made famous by Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff, about the Project Mercury astronauts, but that book was not the first use of the phrase. Screw the pooch is a euphemistic form of the phrase fuck the dog. The latter originally meant to loaf, to goof off, to shirk one’s work, and it comes out of World War I soldier slang. The underlying metaphor is in doing something one is not supposed to be doing. Some decades later, a second sense developed, that is to make a disastrous mistake, to fail, and the screw the pooch wording has only this second sense.

Fucking the dog, or rather a euphemized version of it, feeding the dog, appears in the 25 May 1918 issue of the Trouble Buster, a monthly unit newsletter published by the U.S. Army General Hospital No. 2 at Fort McHenry, Maryland. It appears in a glossary of army abbreviations:

F.T.D.—Feeding the dog. The supposed occupation of a soldier who is killing time.

The phrase appears uneuphemized, but still expurgated, in Jack Conroy’s 1935 novel A World to Win:

“One of the first things you gotta learn when you’re f——n’ the dog,” said Leo, “is t’ look like you’re workin’ hard enough t’ make yer butt blossom like a rose. Rattle templets, beat the hammer on a beam, but do somethin’. If the boss ketches you f——n’ the dog while you’re helpin’ me, he’ll eat me up blood raw. First thing I ever learned from old Willie, the sawyer, when I went t’ work in the mill in Green Valley, was t’ fool around doin’ nothing’ but keepin’ busy at the same time.”

A use of the phrase which can be interpreted as either to loaf or to err appears in 1954 in a psychological case study by Daniel Silverman:

Two days later he precipitated an argument with his boss and was fired. He was able to see that that he was trying to act a defiant role and to punish himself. This was followed by a four-month period of “funking”, “fucking the dog”, characterized by drinking, missed hours, tardiness, and “sponging” on mother.

And by 1962 we get an example of fuck the dog clearly being used in the sense of to screw up, to make a big mistake. It appears in John Oliver Killens’s novel And Then We Heard the Thunder. While the book was written in the early 1960s, the context of the phrase’s use is during World War II:

Friday night Rutherford called him into the office. He looked at him sternly. Finally he said, “Saunders, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, I swear before the Lord I don’t. You’ve gone and fucked the dog again.”

Solly thought, he’s found out about the letters! And he realized then how scared he was about them. His heart was beating doubletime. To hell with Scotty. He didn’t want any part of the stockade. A sharp pain in between his buttocks. “We did our best, sir.” Hating the sound of his own voice. “Private First-Class Moore and I—”

Rutherford cut him off. “You’ve done your level best all right. You just had the best damn records in the regiment, that’s all. The CO smiling broadly now. “You just keep fucking up like that and you just might make sergeant one of these days.”

The screw the pooch wording is in place by 1978, when it is used in Michael T. Hinkemeyer’s novel The Creator in a passage in which a Russian contemplates American slang:

It meant Vazarov was watching that was good and bad. Good if Markov brought home the bacon, and bad if he ... what was a good phrase? Bad if he couldn’t cut the mustard, or screwed the pooch? These Americans! They even made movies about the latter, he had learned, which were regarded as high art among certain social circles in New York City. Still, they had an inventive language, even if it did not approach the evocative force and color of a good Russian curse.

And finally, the next year Tom Wolfe uses the phrase in The Right Stuff, about the sinking of Astronaut Gus Grissom’s capsule following the second US crewed spaceflight on 21 July 1961. At the time, it was thought that Grissom had prematurely fired the explosive bolts to open the capsule’s hatch after splashdown, allowing water to pour in, sinking the capsule and almost drowning Grissom. More recent evidence has shown that the bolts were blown by mechanical failure and that Grissom had not erred. In a chapter titled The Unscrewable Pooch, Wolfe writes:

In flight test, if you did something that stupid, if you destroyed a major prototype through some lame-brain mistake such as hitting the wrong button—you were through! You’d be lucky to end up in Flight Engineering. Oh, it was obvious to everyone at Edwards that Grissom had just fucked it, screwed the pooch, that was all.

And a bit later:

The Mercury astronauts had official immunity to three-fourths of the things by which test pilots were ordinarily judged. They were now ablaze with the superstitious aura of the single-combat warrior. They were the heroes of Kennedy’s political comeback, the updated new frontier whose symbol was a voyage to the moon. To announce that the second one, Gus Grissom, had prayed to the Lord: “Please, dear God, don’t let me fuck up”—but that his prayer had not been answered, and the Lord let him screw the pooch—well, this was an interpretation of that event that was to be avoided at all cost.

In the 1983 movie version of Wolfe’s book, these passages are played as a conversation between test pilot Chuck Yeager and flight engineer Jack Ridley (in real life, Ridley had died in 1957, but the movie kept him alive for dramatic purposes):

RIDLEY: Pull that in flight test, it's all over for him. He screwed the pooch, partner. Plain and simple.

YEAGER: Sometimes you get a pooch that can't be screwed. The President's got his own problems with the Bay of Pigs. He doesn't want the astronauts' image tarnished. Nothing these guys do is going to be called a failure.

What we have here is a term that circulated in American military slang for decades, until a euphemized version broke out into the general public’s perception.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

“Army Abbreviations.” The Trouble Buster, 1.4, 25 May 1918, 4. ProQuest.

Conroy, Jack. A World to Win. New York: Covici Friede, 1935, 203.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. screw, v., dog, n.2.

Hinkemeyer, M. Thomas. The Creator. Los Angeles: Pinnacle Books, 1978, 63–64.

Kaufman, Philip, director and screenwriter, Tom Wolfe, novel. The Right Stuff (film). Warner Bros: 1983.

Killens, John Oliver. And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962). Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1983, 144.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, modified September 2021, s.v. screw, v.; June 2008, modified September 2021, s.v. fuck, v.

Sheidlower, Jesse. The F Word, third edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 22–23, s.v. dog, n.

Silverman, Daniel. “The Analysis of an Unconscious Pinocchio Fantasy in an Obsessional Neurosis.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 35, 1954, 351. PEP-WEB Journals Archive.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979, 289, 290–91.

Image credit: NASA, 1961. Public domain image.

assignation

A lovers’ assignation gone very, very wrong. James Northcote’s c.1790 depiction of Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3. In a portion of the scene that dramatic productions often omit, Friar Laurence appears in the tomb in the moments between Romeo’s and Juliet’s deaths, offering to take Juliet to a convent. She refuses, and when he leaves kills herself. In the painting, Laurence, bearing a torch, appears on the stairs, looking down on the scene. Juliet has her hand raised, as if dismissing him. Romeo and Paris lie dead beside her.

15 October 2021

At its core, an assignation is an appointment. It can be an assignment to an office or duty, an allocation of land or money, or it can be a meeting. In current usage, it is often used to refer to a lover’s tryst, although that meaning does not appear until the Early Modern Period.

As one might guess from the -tion ending, assignation is from Latin via the Anglo-Norman assignacion. In French, the word dates to the fourteenth century and could mean an appointment of office or authority, a fixed date or appointment, or a promised payment, especially of a pension or allowance. In medieval Latin, the word meant much the same as in Anglo-Norman, but in classical Latin its meaning was limited to an assignment or allotment, especially of land. While the sense of an appointment or meeting was present in earlier French and medieval Latin texts, it was not present in Middle English.

Assignation appears in English starting in the fifteenth century. Here is an example from a 1432 decision of the English Privy Council giving the Earl of Warwick authority over King Henry VI’s education. Henry VI was the only child of Henry V, of Battle of Agincourt fame, and ascended to the throne when he was only nine months old. Warwick was the king’s tutor and this decision allowed Warwick to appoint and dismiss instructors as he saw fit.

He desireth therfore for the goode of hte Kyng and for his owen[e] seuretee to have powere auctoritee to name ordeyne and assigne and for cause þat shal be thought to hym resonable to remoeve þoo þat shal be aboute þe K[ing]’[s] persone of what estate or what estate or condic[i]on þat þei be, not entendyng to comp[re]hende in this desire the Steward Chamberlein Tresourer Contreoullor ne Sergeans of offices save suche as serve aboute þe Kyng’[s] persone and for his mouthe.

Responsio. As toward the namyng ordennaunce and assignac[i]on beforesaide, it is agreed, so that he take ynne noon of þe iiij. knyghtes ne squiers for the body withouten þadvis of my Lorde of Bedford hym beying in Englande, and hym beyng oute, of my Lorde of Gloucestre and of the remenant of the Kyng’[s] counseil.

By the end of the sixteenth century, we see English picking up the sense of assignation meaning the date set for a meeting. It appears in an anonymous 1590 translation of the Spanish romance The First Book of Amadis of Gaule, where it is used to refer to the time appointed for combat between two knights:

Amadis thus spake to the Damosels. Faire friends, I would not be knowen to any one, therefore till such time as the Knight come to the Combate, I intend to withhold my selfe from the place: and when the howre is, let your Squire bring me tidings thereof hither. Sir, quoth the Damosels, as yet there wants two dayes of the assignation, therefore if you please we will tarry with you: and our Squire shall goe into the Towne, to bring vs word when the Knight is arriued.

The sense of a lovers’ tryst appears in the middle of the seventeenth century. From a 1652 translation of Antoine Du Périer’s The Loves and Adventures of Clerio and Lozia:

But whilest he was floating upon the waves of these distracted irresolutions, the time of the assignation approached, wherein he was to visit his Love, for which end he dressed himself after the French fashion

And we see it again in William Lower’s 1658 play The Enchanted Lovers:

I'l be a witness of thy secret love;
Another shall inform me on't, Thimantes
Will tell me all the Plot; to him I'l go,
And give him notice of the assignation;
He'l come to let me know sure, if Diana
Appeareth there; or if it be Ismenia,
J shall do him a mischief; when Thimantes
Shall see his Mistress appoint secret meetings
To others then himself at such an hour

There is a 1699 use of assignation room to refer to the place of such a tryst, but this seems to be a singular, one-off use, as the phrase does not reappear. From a letter published under the title The Billet Doux, Sent by a Citizens-Wife in Dublin Tempting Me to Leudness: With My Answers to Her:

I am the more Confirm'd in my Thoughts, that it was a Snare laid for your Reputation, when I consider your way of carrying your self, the plainness of your Habit, and the influence which your Illness and late Scuffle must needs have had upon your outside; and especially, that the Letter was directed to your Auction-Room, for if the design had taken, then there would have been ground for Patrick to have Libell’d you in the Irish Flying Post, and to have call’d it an Assignation-Room for Strumpets, instead of an Auction-Room for Books; which would have effectually hinder'd any Mans frequenting it, who had but the least value for his Reputation.

But in nineteenth-century America, the term assignation house would become a regular euphemism for a brothel. From 23 March 1848 testimony about the conditions in the County Prison of Norwalk, Connecticut:

The one who is in bad company, is the son of a colored woman, who is in the State Prison for assault with intent to kill. She kept an assignation house in this city for colored people. She stabbed, in the dark, after the lights were blown out. It is supposed she aimed at another person, and thrust the dirk through her daughter’s neck.

So, assignation is an example of a linguistic principle that is akin to Gresham’s Law. Instead of bad money driving out the good, salacious meanings of words and phrases tend to drive out the unobjectionable and anodyne ones.

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Sources:

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

The Billet Doux, Sent by a Citizens-Wife in Dublin Tempting Me to Leudness: With My Answers to Her. London: George Latkin, Jr., 1699, 210–11. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“County Prison, Norwich, Connecticut,” 23 March 1848. Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Prison Discipline Society. Boston: T.R. Marvin, 1848, 251. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Du Périer, Antoine. The Loves and Adventures of Clerio and Lozia. A Romance. Kirkman, Francis, trans. London: J.M., 1652, 16. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The First Book of Amadis of Gaule. London: E. Allde, 1590, 67. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Latham, R.E., D.R. Howlett, and R.K. Ashdowne, eds. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. assignatio. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, eds. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. assignatio. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lower, William. The Enchanted Lovers. The Hague, Adrian Vlack, 1658, 3.4, 60. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. assignacioun.

Nicolas, Harris. Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, vol. 4. London: Commissioners on the Public Records, 1835, 133. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius MS E.v., fol. 315.

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

Image credit: James Northcote, c.1790. Public domain image.

gopher / gofer / gopher-wood

A plains pocket gopher (Geomys bursarius). A brown rodent with long claws.

14 October 2021

A gopher is a burrowing rodent of the family Geomyidae. Some thirty-five species of gopher are found throughout North and Central America. The word is almost certainly a clipping of megopher, a name for the gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) in several Muskogean languages. In Choctaw, a Muskogean language, kofussa means hollow or excavation, and the gopher tortoise is a burrowing creature. (Both /g/ and /k/ are velar plosives and it’s easy to exchange one for another, so the initial /k/ is understood as and becomes /g/ to those unfamiliar with the language.) But there are two other commonly seen uses of gopher, one is biblical and etymologically unrelated, the type of wood that Noah used to build his ark, and the second is a play on words used to refer to a menial assistant, one who runs errands.

Megopher appears in English in an 8 July 1789 letter published in the Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State to days later:

The father of Snarler, old Manger, ran himself to death that he might keep the allegators in the neighbouring pond from eating light-wood-knots; and Zoila, his mother, was found the ninth day driving the buzzards from the bones of a polecat, and at last expired by the mouth of a megopher’s hole, where she had lain twenty days keeping the owner from enjoying his habitation.

Megopher, in the form magopher, continued in southern, especially Georgia, dialect into the twentieth century.

The clipping gopher, used as the name of the tortoise, is recorded before that of the rodent. William Bartram did so in his 1791 account of his travels through the southern United States. The word appears twice in his account:

The dense, or caverns, dug in the sand-hills, by the great land-tortoise, called here Gopher*, present a very singular appearance: these vast caves are their castles and diurnal retreats, from whence they issue forth in the night, in search of prey.

The note to this passage reads:

* Testudo Polyphemus.

The second instance in Bartram’s account reads:

Observed as we passed over the sand hills, the dens of the great land tortoise, called gopher: this strange creature remains yet undescribed by historians and travellers. The first signs of this animal’s existence, as we travel Southerly, are immediately after we cross the Savanna River.

The use of gopher as a synonym for tortoise or turtle continues in southern US dialect to this day.

Gopher as the name of the rodent is first recorded several decades after its use to mean a tortoise, in an installment of an 1811 series of newspaper articles by H.M. Brackenridge, Sketches of the Territory of Louisiana:

The gopher is another non descript, which lives under ground, in the prairies; but is also found east of the Mississippi.

Non-descript is being used here in its technical sense of a previously undescribed species. an editor’s note to this passage reads:

If the gopher is not the animal described, in the systima natura, as mus bursorius, by Linnӕus, it is, as yet, undescribed. A careful examination, into the construction of its mouth, and the number of the teeth, will convince us, that it ought not to belong to the genus mus, but ought to form a new genus, between that family, Arctomys.

The series of articles was re-edited and published in 1814 under the title Views of Louisiana.

That accounts for the animals, but what about the use of gopher to mean a menial assistant? That sense is a play on words. It is usually spelled gofer, but is occasionally spelled gopher, as well. A gofer or gopher is someone who runs errands for someone else, who “goes for” things. The term is recorded in a 1930 list of gangster slang terms that appeared in the journal American Mercury. In the glossary it is defined as “a dupe,” but the example sentence that is given uses it in the sense of a menial person:

Gofor, n.: a dupe.
“Listen monkey, don’t be a gofer all your life.”

The biblical gopher wood, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery. Gopher here is a translation of the Hebrew גֹפֶר‎. But no one knows exactly what the Hebrew word refers to. It is what is known as a hapax legomenon, a term that appears in only one place. That place is Genesis 6:14. Its first English appearance is in a 1568 translation of the Bible:

Make thee an Arke of Pine trees

To which the translator has added the marginal note:

Gophere a very lyght kinde of wood

The 1611 Authorized (King James) Version translates Genesis 6:14 as:

Make thee an Arke of Gopher-wood

Some present day translations, like the New Revised Standard Version translate it as cypress wood. To which the New Oxford Annotated Bible adds the note: “Meaning of Heb uncertain.”

So, we have three different origins here. A Hebrew word of mysterious meaning, a Native American name for a burrowing creature, and a pun on gopher and go for.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

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

Bartram, William. Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791. Reprinted London: J. Johnson, 1792, 180. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Brackenridge, H.M. “Sketches of the Territory of Louisiana.” Louisiana Gazette (Saint Louis), 28 February 1811, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

———. Views of Louisiana. Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear, and Eichbaum, 1814, 58–59. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Burke, James P. “The Argot of the Racketeers.” The American Mercury, December 1930, 456. The Unz Review.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. magopher, n., gopher, n.

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

The Holie Bible. London: Richard Jugge, 1568. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Holy Bible (Authorized Version). London: Robert Barker, 1611. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Letter, 8 July 1789. The Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State (Georgia), 11 July 1789, 4. Digital Library of Georgia: Georgia Historic Newspapers.

Merriam-Webster, s.v. gopher, noun.

New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version). Michael D. Coogan, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gopher, n.1, gopher, n.2, gofer, n.3.

Photo credit: U.S. National Park Service, no date. Public domain image.

scapegoat

A brown-and-white goat standing on a tree stump

13 October 2021

[14 October 2021: added the Voltaire quotation.]

A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins or mistakes of others. It’s an odd word, and one would not guess its meaning from understanding the elements of the compound, a goat that escapes. It arises out of biblical translation, either an error on the part of translators or an attempt to make comprehensible something that the translators assumed their readers would not understand.

The biblical passage in question is Leviticus 16:7–10, which describes a rite of atonement. In present-day translation, in this case the New Revised Standard Version, it reads:

He [i.e., Aaron] shall take two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting; and Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord, and offer it as a sin offering; but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.

The Hebrew לַעֲזָאזֵל (for Azazel) literally means “angry/fierce god” and is understood to be a non-Hebrew god, contrasting with Yahweh or the “Lord,” prior to the development of monotheism or of a demon after that. The fate of either goat is not a good one, either sacrifice in the temple or dying alone at the paws of a predator in the wilderness.

The English word scapegoat enters into the picture with William Tyndale’s 1530 translation of the Pentateuch, in which he renders the phrase for Azazel as the word scapegoat:

And he [i.e., Aaron] shall take the two gootes and present them before the Lorde in the dore of the tabernacle of witnesse. And Aaro[n] cast lottes ouer the .ij. gootes: one lotte for the Lorde, a[n]d another for a scapegoote. And Aaron shall bringe the goote apo[n] which the Lordes lotte fell, and offer him for a synneofferynge. But the goote on which the lotte fell to scape, he shall sett alyue before the Lorde to reco[n]cyle with a[n]d to let him goo fre in to the wildernesse.

It’s a rather free translation that, while accurate enough, omits mention of a god or demon that would probably be unknown to the readership. The 1611 Authorized (King James) Bible maintained Tyndale’s use of scapegoat.

But while Tyndale was the first to use scapegoat, he was far from the first biblical translator to play fast and loose with this passage. The Septuagint, whose translation of the Hebrew Pentateuch into Greek dates to the third century BCE, translates it as τραγος αποπομπαίος (tragos apopompaios, sent-forth goat). Jerome’s Vulgate translation renders it as caper emissarius (sent-forth goat). And slightly later than Tyndale, Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation, which is based on Latin and Dutch translations, not directly from Hebrew, renders it as fre goate (free goat).

After Tyndale, and especially after it appears in the 1611 Authorized Version, scapegoat starts to be used more widely, but for several centuries only in the context of sermons and commentaries on Leviticus. It isn’t until the late eighteenth century that we start seeing scapegoat being used generally to mean someone who is unfairly blamed.

The 1778 play The Gospel-Shop features a character named Dr. Scapegoat, described as “a rich covetous Methodist Preacher.”

And on 30 November 1778, the London newspaper the Public Advertiser published a commentary objecting to a display of four Roman lictors, attendants and bodyguards to the emperor, comparing them to civil servants in eighteenth-century England. It’s contemporary political commentary masquerading as art criticism. And the scapegoats in question are esteemed ministers and members of parliament, who are undone by their staffers:

Or could it be that eminent Tea-dealer, that Parliament-jobber, who, notwithstanding his glaring Inferiority to Mediocrity, is so very notable, such an Ar-all, so never at a Loss, to whom nothing comes amiss, who, by perking his false Importance in his Sovereign’s Face, has passed upon him all the Results of a Parliament’s systematical Servility, for HIS OWN Dexterity of Management and high Statesmanship; who, if not the primary Instigator of that calamitous Civil War, which, with so much Ease, with so much Advantage, and, above all, with so much Honour might have been avoided, has been, at least, a fribbling, officious Minister of it: Who now seems to aim at making his Master the Scapegoat of the Storm under Color of the ridiculous Flattery contained  in the Attribution to him of being “his own Minister.”

And a bit later we have Admiral John Byng being labeled a scapegoat. Byng was held responsible for the 1756 loss of Minorca to the French during the Seven Years’ War. Byng was court-martialed and executed. This passage appears in a multi-volume set, The Naval and Military History of the Wars of England. The volumes were produced between 1795–1807, but the individual volumes are, for the most part, not dated, so we don’t know the exact year this was published:

They ridiculed and refuted the reasons he had given for returning to Gibraltar, after his scandalous encounter with the French squadron; and, in order to exasperate them to the most implacable resentment, they exagggerated [sic] the terrible consequences of losing Minorca, which must now be subdued through his treachery or want of resolution. In a word, he was devoted as the scapegoat of the ministry, to whose supine negligence, ignorance, and misconduct, the loss of that important fortress was undoubtedly owing.

Byng was executed on 14 March 1757, and two years later, in his novel Candide, Voltaire makes reference to Byng’s execution. Candide and his traveling companion Martin, upon their arrival in England, witness the execution of an admiral, who is not named but clearly represents Byng. In an exchange that perfectly sums up the concept of scapegoating, Candide asks Martin:

“Et pourquoi tuer cet amiral?”

“C'est, lui dit-on, parcequ'il n'a pas fait tuer assez de monde; il a livré un combat à un amiral français, et on a trouvé qu'il n'était pas assez près de lui.”

“Mais,” dit Candide, “l'amiral français était aussi loin de l'amiral anglais que celui-ci l'était de l'autre!”

“Cela est incontestable, lui répliqua-t-on; mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.”

("And why kill this Admiral?"

"It is because he did not kill a sufficient number of men himself. He gave battle to a French Admiral; and it has been proved that he was not near enough to him."

"But," replied Candide, "the French Admiral was as far from the English Admiral."

"There is no doubt of it; but in this country it is found good, from time to time, to kill one Admiral to encourage the others.")

Discuss this post

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Sources:

The Bible. Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Leviticus 16:7–10.

Bible, Pentateuch. William Tyndale, trans. Antwerp: Johan Hoochstraten, 1530, Leviticus 16, fol. 29v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Biblia. Myles Coverdale, trans. Cologne: E. Cervicornus and J. Soter, 1535, Leviticus 16, fol. 49r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Biblia Sacra Vulgata, fifth edition. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007, Liber Levitici 16:7–10.

Hill, R. The Gospel-Shop, a Comedy of Five Acts. London: Fielding and Walker, 1778. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 1991, 411–12, s.v. scapegoat.

The Naval and Military History of the Wars of England, vol. 6. London: Lewis and Co., 1795–1807, 57. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

The New Oxford Annotated Bible, third edition. Michael D. Coogan, ed. New Revised Standard Version. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007, Leviticus 16:7–10, 165.

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

“Ulterior Remarks.” Public Advertiser (London), 30 November 1778, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Voltaire. Candide (1759). Paris: Chez Lefèvre, 1829. Project Gutenberg.

———. Candide (1759). New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918. Project Gutenberg.

Image credit: Armin Kübelbeck, 2010. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

scab

Attack of striking railroad workers on scab switchmen and brakeman during an 1888 strike against the Burlington and Quincy Railroad in Chicago. Black and white drawing of men throwing rocks and bricks at railroad workers aboard a train. Other men, armed with shotguns, are atop the train as well.

12 October 2021

[Update, 13 October 2021: paragraph about Ode to a Scab added.]

A scab is the growth that covers a wound to the skin. It is also a slang term for a strikebreaker in a labor dispute. But how did the word develop such different meanings?

Scab is from the Old English sceabb, which referred to a variety of skin diseases, including but not exclusively leprosy. In two old entries, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) splits the word into two, with shab coming from the Old English, and scab coming from an unattested Old Norse root, *skabbr. But the OED immediately calls this etymology into question. Not only is the Old Norse root unattested, but the earliest citation of the scab form is in a thirteenth-century Kentish dialect, and that dialect did not have significant Old Norse influence. It seems more likely the older OED entries are incorrect, and scab and shab are different forms of the same word, with the later scab form being influenced by the Latin scabies.

An example of the Old English is from the translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, written in the late ninth century:

Soðlice se hæfð singalne sceabb se þe næfre ne blinð ungestæððignesse. Ðonne bi ðæm sceabbe swiðe ryhte sio hreofl getacnað ðæt wohhæmed. And ðonne bið se lichoma hreof, ðonne se bryne þe on ðæm innoðe bið utaflihð to ðære hyde. Swæ bið sio costung ærest on ðæm mode, & ðonne færeð utweardes to ðære hyde, oððæt hio utascieð on weorc.

(Truly, he has chronic scabbiness who never desists from sin. Then by the scabs very directly the scurf symbolizes that fornication. And when the body is scurfy, then the inflammation that is inside spreads to the skin. So is the temptation first in the mind, and then travels outward to the skin, until it bursts forth in action.)

The aforementioned thirteenth-century Kentish source is from a sermon:

Se leprus signefiez þo senuulle men. si lepre þo sennen. Þet scab bi tokned þo litle sennen. si lepre be tokned þo grete sennen þet biedh diadliche. Ase so is lecherie. spusbreche. Gauelinge. Roberie. þefte. Glutunie. drunkenesse. and alle þo sennen þurch wiche me liest þo luue of gode almichti and of alle his haleghen.

(The leprous signify the sinful men. The leprosy is their sins. That scab symbolizes their little sins. The leprosy symbolized their great sins that are deadly. So, leprosy is spouse-breaking, usury, robbery, theft, gluttony, drunkenness, and all those sins through which one loses the love of God almighty and all his saints.)

Note that in both these early uses, scab refers to a skin disease, and it’s metaphorically associated with sinfulness and bad action. The sense of scab referring to the growth that covers a wound to the skin appears by the late fourteenth century. It appears in a c.1380 translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s treatise on surgery in a section about how to heal ulcers of leprosy and ringworm:

If þere ben pustulis þat ben hote & ful of blood, & þe skyn be ful of humouris & neische, þanne it is good for to garce þat skyn, & þanne waische al his heed with þat blood hoot, & þanne hile his heed wiþ caule leuis. þanne aftirward anoynte al his heed wiþ oile of notis ouþer of camomil hoot, til al þe scabbis þerof be wel tobroke. & þanne bigynne for to drie with þese driynge medicyns.

(If there are pustules that are hot and full of blood, and the skin is full of humors and tender, then it is good to cut that skin and then wash all his head with that hot blood, and then heal his head with kale leaves. Then afterward anoint all his head with oil of nuts or hot camomile, till all the scabs thereof are well broken open. And then begin to dry with these drying medicines.)

By the late sixteenth century, a slang sense of scab had developed, meaning a scoundrel or low person. Skin diseases are not pleasant, and as we have seen, have been associated with bad behavior from the beginning, so it’s easy to see how the leap was made from the medical conditions to low character. We see this slang sense in Robert Wilson’s 1590 play The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London. In the play, three lords and their pages, Policy (page Wit), Pomp (page Wealth), and Pleasure (page Will) debate which of three London women is the right match for Policy:

Pom[pe]. Whom louest thou pleasure?

Plea[sure]. Hearke ye. Whisper in his eare.

Pom[pe]. Lush, ye lie.

Wil. If my maister were a souldier, that word wold haue the stab.

Wit. Wel Wil, stil you'll be a saucie Scab.

This use was likely preceded by John Lyly’s use of the slang sense of scab in his play Endymion. The play was probably written in the 1580s, but was not published until 1591. Furthermore, the 1591 printing omits the portion that includes scab. The word appears in a song that ends Act 4, Scene 2, but the song is mentioned as a stage direction, but the words are not reproduced in that early printing. The song isn’t printed until a 1632 edition:

Watch[men]. Stand! Who goes there?
We charge you appeare
Fore our Constable here.
(In the name of the Man in the Moon)
To vs Bilmen relate,
Why you stagger so late.
And how you come drunke so soone.

Pages. What are yee (scabs?)

Watch. The Watch:
This the Constable.

Pages. A Patch.

Const. Knockʼem down unlesse they all stand
If any run away,
Tis the old Watchmans play,
To reach him a Bill of his hand.

We cannot know if scab appeared in the Lyly’s original version of the play. The song lyrics may have changed between the 1580s and 1632.

The sense of a low, disreputable person is applied to strikebreakers in labor disputes by the latter half of the eighteenth century. The OED has this citation from Bonner & Middleton’s Bristol Journal of 5 July 1777:

To the Public. Whereas the Master Cordwainers have gloried, that there has been a Demur amongst the Men's and Women's Men;—we have the Pleasure to inform them, that Matters are amicably settled. [...] The Conflict would not been [sic] so sharp had not there been so many dirty Scabs; no Doubt but timely Notice will be taken of them.

And another early use of the strikebreaker sense appears in the Articles of the Friendly and United Society of Cordwainers (shoemakers) of 4 June 1792:

Some of the Articles make mention of scabs. And what is a scab? He is to his trade what a traitor is to his country; though both may be useful to one party in troublesome times, when peace returns they are detested alike by all. When help is wanted, he is the last to contribute assistance, and the first to grasp a benefit he never laboured to procure. He cares but for himself, but he sees not beyond the extent of a day, and for a momentary and worthless approbation, would betray friends, family and country. In short, he is a traitor on a small scale. He first sells the journeymen, and is himself afterwards sold in his turn by the masters, till at last he is despised by both and deserted by all. He is an enemy to himself, to the present age and to posterity.

That’s how pustules on the skin were transformed into strikebreakers.

Note: a piece titled Ode to a Scab, about strikebreakers, is frequently credited to Jack London, but there is no evidence that he wrote it. The piece dates to at least 1912, when it is circulated anonymously in a number of trade-union journals. London’s name becomes attached to it by 1950, long after the writer’s death.

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Sources:

Aspinall, A., ed. “Articles of the Friendly and United Society of Cordwainers” (4 June 1792). Early English Trade Unions. London: Batchworth Press, 1949, 84. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Fleischhaker, Robert, ed. Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie.” Early English Text Society OS 102. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894, 185. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1396.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. scab, n.1.

Hall, Joseph. “Dominica tercia post octavam epiphanie” (The Third Sunday After the Eighth Epiphany). Selections from Early Middle English 1130–1250, vol. 1 of 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920, 218. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 471.

Latham, R.E., D.R. Howlett, and R.K. Ashdowne. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. scabies. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. scabies. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lyly, John. Endimion, The Man in the Moone. London: I. Charlewood for the Widow Broome, 1591, sig. G2r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. “Endimion.” Sixe Court Comedies. London: William Stansby for Edward Blount, 1632, sig. E2r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. scab(be n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. scab, n., shab, n.

Sweet, Henry, ed. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society OS 45. London: N. Trübner, 1871, 70. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius B.11.

Wilson, Robert. The Pleasant and Stately Morall, of the Three Lordes and Three Ladies of London. London: R. Jhones, 1590, sig. Bv. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: J. Anderson, 1888. In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 7 April 1888. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Public Domain Image.