scuttlebutt

WWII-era poster featuring a sailor named “Scuttlebutt Sam” pointing to another sailor’s insignia of rank, a pig’s head over three chevrons, and saying, “Don’t let them hang it on you! It Means Food Waster First Class!” The bottom of the poster reads in large letters, “Don’t waste food!”

20 October 2021

Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip and rumor. The word arises in nautical jargon of the days of sail where a scuttlebutt was literally a cask containing drinking water for those on-board ship. A scuttle is a hole, and a butt is a barrel or cask. Therefore, a scuttlebutt is a water cask with a hole punched in it from which water can be drawn.

Naturally, sailors would gather around the scuttlebutt and talk, much as twentieth-century office workers would gather around the watercooler. (That analogy is perhaps a bit dated now, though.) This practice is referred to in Herman Melville’s 1850 novel White-Jacket, which is based on his time aboard the frigate USS United States from 1843–44.

There is no part of a frigate where you will see more going and coming of strangers, and overhear more greetings and gossipings of acquaintances, than in the immediate vicinity of the scuttle-butt, just forward of the main-hatch- way, on the gun-deck.

But as steam replaced sails and pipes replaced wooden casks, the need for literal scuttlebutts on-board ship faded, but the word hung on in reference to the conversations and rumors that had once taken took place there. It is in the US Navy that we see scuttlebutt shift from a jargon term for a physical object to the slang sense of gossip and rumor.

In the transition from cask to rumor, we see the word first used as an adjective. From an account published by Henry Harrison Lewis from sailors aboard a US Navy vessel during the Spanish-American War of 1898:

The rumor committee, otherwise known as the “Scuttle-butt Navigators,” to which every man on board was elected as a life member the moment he promulgated a rumor, was soon actively engaged, and it was definitely settled the Yankee was to become the flagship of the whole fleet, our captain made lord high admiral, and the whole Spanish nation swept off the face of the globe in about thirteen and a half seconds by the chronometer.

And in 1910 we get this from the Our Navy newspaper:

Press stories and scuttle butt rumors put the Buffalo in the society class by stating a fair young demoiselle of the Hawaiian group secreted herself in the intricacies of the transport’s lower decks and rode undisturbed into San Francisco.

And there is this from William Richmond’s 1912 Nine Months on a Cruise. It’s unclear whether “Scuttle Butt News” was an actual publication, or just a nickname for rumor:

At each meal, and when groups gathered together in their part of the ship for a talkfest, speculation was rife as to where we were going and why. Extra editions of the “Scuttle Butt News” were published at frequent intervals, and each number contained the latest dope as to our future movements.

And by 1913 we start to see scuttlebutt used as a noun. Again, from Our Navy:

These desertions are not caused by discontentment on the ship, but as far as can be learned via “scuttle butt,” by lack of consideration for this class of vessel in the Department, and the idea of completing a four-year cruise on this Station, everyone believing that after two years they should be sent to duty in the United States, their home country, as the European navies do.

And this explanation isn’t just scuttlebutt; it’s documented.

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Sources:

“The Bulletin Board.” Our Navy, June 1913, 23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Ess Dee Stowaways.” 19. Our Navy, September 1910. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Lewis, Henry Harrison, ed. “A Gunner On ..... Board the ‘Yankee.’” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 25 September 1898, 11. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Melville, Herman. White-Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War (1850). Boston: St. Botolph Society, 1923, 265. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. scuttlebutt, n., scuttled, adj., scuttle, v.2.

Richmond, William E. Nine Months on a Cruise and Experiences in Nicaragua. 1912. 6–7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: US Office for Emergency Management, War Production Board, 1942–43. US National Archives. Public domain image.

scot-free

19 October 2021

First, to get it out of the way, the word Scot, referring to a person from Scotland, is an entirely different word and has nothing to do with scot-free. Second, in the past, there was a common variant shot-free. That variant is much rarer now, but it can still be heard in certain places.

Note: the standard practice in linguistics is to use angled brackets, < >, to mark spellings and slashes, / /, to mark pronunciations.

Scot and shot come from the Old English sceot, meaning an arrow or other type of missile, a rapid movement, or a payment. Correspondingly, the Old English verb sceotan meant to shoot an arrow, to move quickly, or to make a payment. The sc- in Old English was pronounced as /ʃ/, similar to the <sch> spelling in modern German or the <sh> spelling in Present Day English. The payment senses of scot, shot, and to shoot have largely disappeared, except in the fossilized idioms of scot-free and shot-free, but you can still find the payment meaning in particular contexts and dialects. But in the twelfth century, the early Middle English period, the /skɒt/ pronunciation, with a hard <c> or /k/ begins to appear. This was apparently due to influence from cognates in Old Norse that had the /k/ phoneme—the Danes occupied and settled in much of North and Eastern England in the late Old English period, and by the twelfth century that linguistic influence was starting to appear in English writing. For several centuries, both the /sk/ and /ʃ/ pronunciations were used interchangeably.

Then in the later Middle English period we start seeing the <sh> spelling to represent the /ʃ/ pronunciation. And in the Early Modern period, we see the two forms start to diverge semantically. The /sk/ pronunciation, or scot, came to be used for the tax and payment senses, while the /ʃ/ pronunciation, or shot, came to be used for the ammunition and movement senses, with an exception being the word shot-free, which is synonymous with scot-free. And in Present-Day English, scot has largely dropped out of the active vocabulary, being used mostly in historical contexts and in scot-free.

Scot-free appears as early as 1054 CE, when it appears in a bequest of land to Westminster Abbey sanctioned by Edward the Confessor:

Ic cyðe eow þæt ic wille þæt þæt cotlif Leosne þe Ætsere ahte & becwæð Criste & Sancte Petre into Westmynstre ligge nu ðider inn to ðæra muneca fodan mid eallum ðæra ðingum þe þær to hyreð on wude & on felde, on mæde & on wætere & on ealle oðre þingum scotfreo & gafolfreo on scire & on hundrede swa ful & swa forð swa he hit Sancte Petre becwæð & ic ðes fullice geuðe.

(I say to you that that my will is that the estate of Lessness that Ætsere owned and bequeathed to Christ and to Saint Peter into Westminster now belongs to that habitation for the monk’s food with all the things that there belong to it in wood and field, in meadow and in water, and all other things scot-free and tax-free in shire and in hundred as completely and as freely as he bequeathed it to Saint Peter and I fully consent to this.)

By the seventeenth century, scot-free was being used more generally to mean free of penalty. We see this expanded sense in a 1622 translation of Matheo Aleman’s The Rogue, in a discussion about legal disputes over debt. One speaker contends that the plaintiff always gets the better of the defendant, so it is usually cheaper and easier to just pay, even if the debt is not legitimate:

But when such things come in question, the accuser hath commonly the better of the accused; the plaintiffe will bee sure to fare well, how ere it goe with the defendant; he hath that he lookes for, he cares for no more; for it is in this, as at Best be trusted, amongst Costermongers, the first speaker scapes scot-free

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Sources:

Aleman, Matheo. The Rogue: or the Life of Guzman de Alfarache, part two of three. London: Printed for Edward Blount, 1622, 231.

Harmer, F.E. Anglo-Saxon Writs. Manchester, England: Manchester UP, 1952, 343. London, Westminster Abbey Munimwnra xi.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. shot, n., scot, n.(2).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, modified September 2021, s.v. scot-free, adj., modified December 2020, scot, n.2; second edition, 1989, shot-free, adj., shot, n.1, shoot, v.

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.

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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.

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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.