crocodile tears

1882 cartoon depicting former US President Ulysses S. Grant weeping over the persecution of Jews in Russia in a ploy to garner Jewish votes for his party in the 1884 presidential election. Grant is depicted dressed in a crocodile’s skin and holding a notice for a meeting in support of Russian Jews, while in the background is a reminder of his 1862 order excluding Jews from service in the U.S. Army.

12 November 2021

[13 November 2021: added reference to the French text of Mandeville. 15 November 2021: added reference to Latini.]

Crocodile tears are an insincere display of sadness or compassion. The phrase comes from the false belief that crocodiles either shed tears in mourning for their victims or that they use tears to lure prey to them. This belief appears in the medieval period but probably dates back into antiquity, although the phrase crocodile tears is more recent. While by no means restricted to women, over the centuries the idea of crocodile tears has often been used misogynistically to brand women as using feigned emotions to deceive men.

The notion of a creature shedding tears for its prey dates to at least the turn of the eleventh century when it appears in De rebus in Oriente miribilibus (The Wonders of the East). The anecdote appears in two manuscripts. One, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v., contains the story in both Anglo-Latin and Old English. The second is the Beowulf manuscript, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv., where a slightly older Old English version appears. From Tiberius B.v.:

Itaque insula est in rubro mari in qua hominum genus est quod apud nos appellatur donestre, quasi divine a capite usque: ad umbilicum, quasi homines reliquo corpore similitudine humana, nationum omnium linguis loquentes cum alieni generis hominem uiderint, ipsius lingua appellabunt eum & parentum eius & cognatorum nomina, blandientes sermone ut decipiant eos & perdant. Cumque conprehenerint eos perdunt eos & comedunt, & postea conprehendunt caput ipsius hominis quem commederunt [sic] & super ipsum plorant.

Ðonne is sum ealand on þære readan sæ, þær is mon cynn þæt is mid us donestre genemned, þa syndon geweaxene swa frihteras fram þam heafde oð ðone nafelan, & se oðer dæl bið mannerlice ge lic & hi cunnon eall mennisc gereord. Þonne hi fremdes kynnes mann geseoð [þo]nne nemnað hi hine & his magas cuþra manna naman & mid leaslicum wordum hine beswicað & hine onfoð & þænne æfter þan hi hine fretað ealne buton his heafde & þonne sittað & wepað ofer ðam heafde.

(There is a an island in the Red Sea in which a type of human which is called by us Donestre, as if divine from the head to the navel, as if humans in the rest of the body in the likeness of humans, they speak in the languages of all nations; when they see a person of a foreign race, they will call upon them in their and language and the names of their parents and kin, flattering with language so that they are deceived and killed; and when they seize them, they kill and eat them, and afterward they take the head of the person whom they have eaten and cry over it.)

Illustration from De rebus in Oriente miribilibus depicting the Donestre. The three-part image shows a Donestre conversing with a man, then attacking and devouring him, and then weeping over the man’s head.

But the Donestre were not crocodiles. The legend attaches to the reptiles by c.1265 when it is mentioned in Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Treasure. About a hundred years later it appears in Mandeville’s Travels. Sir John Mandeville was a fictitious English knight who supposedly traveled the world recording the wondrous things and people he saw. In actuality, the author, whoever that was, probably never traveled, assembling the text from various traveler’s tales and legends and from their own imagination. Appearing in the late fourteenth century, first in French and then English, the text was enormously popular, appearing in over 250 extant manuscripts in various languages:

En ceo pays et par toute Ynde y ad grant foisoun des cocodrilles, c’est une manere des longes serpentz si qe jeo vous ay dit cea en ariere, et par nuyt elles habitent en l’eawe, et par jour sur terre en roches et en caves, et ne mangent point par tout l’yver, ancis gisent en agone si come font les serpentz. Ceste serpent occist les gentz et les mangent en plorant.

In þat contre & be all ynde ben gret plentee of COKODRILLES, þat is in a maner of a long serpent as I have seyd before. And in the nyght þei dwellen in the water & on the day vpon the lond in roches & in Caues. And þei ete no mete in all the wynter, but þei lyȝn as in a drem, as don the serpentes. Þeise serpentes slen men & þei eten hem wepynge.

(In that country & and in all India is a great plenty of crocodiles, that are like the long serpent that I have mentioned before. And in the night they dwell in the water & in the day upon the land in rocks and in caves. And they eat no food in all the winter, but they lie as if in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men & they eat them weeping.)

The version where the crocodile lures its prey to it by feigning sadness and pity is recorded in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 Principall Navigations. The anecdote appears in the account of John Hawkins’s 1564 expedition to the Americas:

In this riuer we saw many crocodils of sundry bignesses, but some as big as a boat, with 4. feet, a long broad mouth, & a long taile, whose skin is so hard, that a sword wil not pierce it. His nature is to liue out of the water as a frog doth, but he is a great deuouer, & spareth neither fish, which is his common food, nor beasts, nor men, if he take them, as the proofe thereof was knowen by a Negroe, who as he was filling water in the riuer was by one of them caried cleane away, and neuer seene after. His nature is euer when he would haue his praie, to crie, and sobbe like a christian bodie, to prouoke them to come come to him, and then hee snatcheth at them, and thereupon came this prouerbe that is applied unto women when they weep Lachrymaæ Crocodili, the meaning whereof is, that as the Crocadile when he crieth, goeth then about most to deceiue, so doth a woman most commonly when she weepeth.

And Henry Cockeram’s 1623 English dictionary includes a description of the crocodile that sounds an awful lot like the early medieval description of the Donestre:

Crocodile, a beast hatched of an egge, yet some of them grow to a great bignesse, as 10. 20. or 30. foot in length: it hath cruell teeth and scaly back, with very sharpe clawes on his feete: if it see a man afraid of him, it will eagerly pursue him, but on the contrary, if he be assaulted he wil shun him. Hauing eate[n] the body of a man, it will weepe ouer the head, but in fine eate the head also: thence came the Prouerb, he shed. Crocodile teares, viz. fayned teares.

The phrase crocodile tears itself appears by 1563, when it is used by Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, in reference to a man who had been excommunicated:

And yet I assure your Lordship, I doubt much of his Zeal. For now after so long Trial, and good Observation of his Proceedings herein, I begin to fear, lest his Humility in Words be a counterfeit Humility, and his Tears, Crocodile Tears, altho’ I my self was much moved with them at the first.

And while he never used the phrase itself, Shakespeare made reference to the notion of crocodile tears in several of his plays, perhaps most notably in his 1603 Othello, Act 4, Scene 1, where Othello dismisses Desdemona’s weeping as false:

Oh diuell, diuell:
If that the Earth could teeme with womans teares,
Each drop she falls, would proue a Crocodile.

Shakespeare’s references to crocodile tears have undoubtedly helped keep the idea and phrase in the popular imagination.

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Sources:

Cockayne, Oswald, ed. “De rebus in oriente mirabilibus.” Narratiunculae Anglice Conscriptae. London: John R. Smith, 1861, 65. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Cockeram, Henry. The English Dictionarie. London: Eliot’s Court Press for Edmund Weaver, 1623, part 3, unnumbered 1–2. Early English Books Online.

Fulk, R.D., ed. The Beowulf Manuscript. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 3. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010, 24. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, fol. 96v–106v.

Hakluyt, Richard. The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation. London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589, 534–35. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Hamelius, P. Mandeville’s Travels, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society, OS 153. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1919, 192. HathTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus C.16.

Latini, Brunetto. The Book of the Treasure—Li Livres dou Tresor. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin, trans. Garland Library of Medieval Literature 90. Series B. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Mandeville, Jean De. Le Livre des Merveilles du Monde. Deluz, Christiane, ed. Sources d’Histoire Médiévale. Paris: CNRS 31, 2000, 452.

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

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

De rebus in Oriente miribilibus (The Wonders of the East). London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v., fol. 83r–v.

Shakespeare, William. Othello. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedie, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio, New South Wales). London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 4.1, 330.

Strype, John. The History of the Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, Edmund Grindal. London: John Hartley, 1710, 78. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credits: Bernard Gillam, 1882, Puck magazine. Public domain image.

De rebus in Oriente miribilibus (The Wonders of the East). London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.v., fol. 83v.

sleep tight

Erik (top) and Charles (bottom) sleeping tight. Two gray and white cats asleep atop a cat tree.

15 November 2021

People often say good night, sleep tight to those who are retiring for the evening, but why sleep tight? The meaning is obvious from the context, to sleep soundly and well, but tight usually means constricted or securely closed, and it’s not generally used adverbially. Fortunately, a look at the history of the word provides the answers. It comes out of an older adverbial use of tight with influence from the old miasma theory of disease.

Tightly in the sense of soundly or well dates to the turn of the seventeenth century. We see it in Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humor, which was first performed in 1598, although the published script comes from 1601. In this passage the character of Giuliano is deploring his brother’s bad behavior, and when he says he shall heare on't, and that tightly too, that means he will give his brother a good talking to:

These are my brothers consorts these, these are his Cumrades, his walking mates, hees a gallant, a Caueliero too, right hangman cut, God let me not liue, and I could not finde in my hart to swinge the whole nest of them, one after another, and begin with him first, I am grieu'd it should be said he is my brother, and take these courses, well he shall heare on't, and that tightly too, and I liue Ifaith.

By the late eighteenth century, we see tight being used adverbially in the same sense. From James Fisher’s 1790 poem The Ale Wife’s Dying Advice:

When they grew doited wi’ the drink,
An’ scarce could either gang or wink,
But lie or tumble o’er a bink,
           I charg’d them tight,
An’ gart them pay o’ lawing clink,
           Mair than was right.

(When they grew impaired with the drink, and scarcely could either go or sleep, but lie or tumble over a bench, I charged them tight, and made them pay more coin than was owed for the boozing.)

The phrase sleep tight, meaning sleep soundly, pops up in North America in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The earliest use that I know of is in a 15 May 1866 diary entry by Susan Bradford Eppes:

All is ready and we leave as soon as breakfast is over. Goodbye little Diary. “Sleep tight and wake bright,” for I will need you when I return.

Another early use is in an 1873 poem titled G’anpa’s Nap, about an old man pretending to be asleep on his front porch while his grandchildren play around him:

“G’anpa, see! we’ve got some posies—
Nicest ones you ever saw!
Mamma gave us all these roses;
Why don’t you wake up, G’anpa?”

“Guess he’s sleep tight,” whispered Gracie;
So they sat down side by side,
Softly playing there, till Daisey
Clapped her little hands and cried.”

And the next year we get this letter, purporting to be from Scottish heather to American trailing arbutus, printed in the Iowa State Register of 5 June 1874:

An’ noo we mann bid ye a lang fareweel while ye tak’ yer summer rest. May ye sleep tight an’ ha’e money happy dreams.

Since plants don’t write letters to one another, this is clearly a fiction invented by the newspaper editors, and one should not read the faux Scottish dialect as being any kind of clue as to the phrase’s origin.

The origin of sleep tight is really quite straightforward. It only seems odd because, other than this phrase, we don’t use tight in this adverbial sense anymore. Sleep tight probably only survives because of the rhyme with good night.

But there is one twist that probably influenced the use of sleep tight, and that is the miasma theory of disease. Prior to the advent of the germ theory of disease, it was commonly thought that many diseases were caused by bad or foul air, miasma. This belief was popular well into the nineteenth century. In her 1860 Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale advises parents not to keep the nursery tight shut up. This advice is repeated, often verbatim, many times throughout the latter half of that century:

That which, however, above all, is known to injure children seriously is foul air, and the most seriously at night. Keeping rooms where they sleep tight shut up is destruction to them.

Of course, here the word tight is modifying shut up, but it could easily be re-analyzed as modifying sleep. While not the direct origin of the phrase sleep tight, repeated reading of the two words side-by-side probably had an influence on the phrase’s coinage and popularity.

Finally, the notion, often spread by tour guides of Elizabethan houses and frequently seen on the internet, that sleep tight comes from the fact that Elizabethan beds had a foundation consisting of a rope net, and when the bed began to sag, one would tighten the net, is simply not true. Beds were once made this way, but that has nothing to do with the phrase, which comes along centuries later.

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Sources:

Eppes, Susan Bradford. Through Some Eventful Years. Macon, Georgia: J.W. Burke, 1926, 328. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Fisher, James. “The Ale Wife’s Dying Advice.” Poems on Various Subjects. Dumfries (Scotland): Robert Jackson, 1790, 61. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Jonson, Ben. Every Man in His Humor (1598). London: Walter Burre, 1601, 1.4, sig. D2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“A Letter from the Heather of Scotland to the Trailing Arbutus of America.” Iowa State Register, 5 June 1874, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Nightingale, Florence. Notes on Nursing. Boston: William Carter, 1860, 96. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Olmes, Elizabeth. “‘G’anpa’s’ Nap.” Zion’s Advocate (Portland, Maine), 17 December 1873, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tight, adj. adv. and n.2, tightly, adv.

Martin, Gary. “Sleep Tight.” The Phrase Finder, n.d.

Image credit: David Wilton, 2021. Licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Montana

A Gros Ventre Indian encampment on the Fort Belknap Reservation, Montana showing a woman seated in front of a hearth, man on horseback, an American flag, and tipis

12 November 2021

A number of Indigenous people dwell or have dwelled in the state that is now called Montana. These include the Blackfeet, Crow, Confederated Salish and Kootenai, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Chippewa-Cree, and Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa. Additionally, peoples who have historically dwelled on the land include the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikira, Nez Perce, and Shoshone. This list is not all-inclusive.

As with many states, there is no single Indigenous name for the territory that is now known as Montana, which is a settler-colonist creation. The name Montana comes from the Spanish montaña (mountain), which in turn is from the Latin montanus, an adjective meaning mountainous. In Latin, montana could also function as a noun meaning mountainous region. The Spanish used the name montaña del norte to refer to the northern portion of the Rocky Mountains.

The name Montana first crops up in English use as a proposed name for what would eventually become the Idaho Territory (Cf. Idaho). From the Albany Journal of 12 February 1863:

The House proceeded to the consideration of the bill reported from the Committee on Territories, to provide for the temporary government of the Territory of Montana, contiguous to the State of Oregon and the Territory of Washington.

But within a month the Senate would change the proposed name to Idaho. From the Buffalo Morning Express of 4 March 1863:

The House concurred in the Senate’s amendments to the bill establishing the territorial government of Montana, changing its name to Idaho.

And the following year, Montana was again proposed, this time for the new territory that the was being organized out of a portion of the Idaho territory. From the Milwaukee Sentinel of 24 February 1864:

MONTANA—The new territory of Montana, which the present Congress is organizing, embraces all that portion of the Idaho territory east of the Rocky mountains.

It is this territory that became the state of Montana in 1889.

Of note is the US Senate debate of 31 March 1864 on organization and naming of the Montana Territory. The senators conclude that the name Montana is from Latin. Their conclusion is incorrect, but their discussion sheds light on attitudes toward naming places. Of particular note is the desire to appropriate an Indigenous name, creating the semblance of historical continuity between the Indigenous and settler-colonist and legitimacy for the latter. The debate also ignores the Spanish history of the name and region:

Mr. SUMNER. The name of this new Territory—Montana—strikes me as very peculiar. I wish to ask the chairman of the committee what has suggested that name? It seems to me it must have been borrowed from some novel or other. I do not know how it originated.

Mr. WADE. I cannot tell anything about that I do not know but that it may have been borrowed from a novel. I would rather borrow from the Indians, if I could find any proper Indian name.

Mr. SUMNER. I was going to suggest that in giving a name to this Territory, which is to be hereafter the name of a State of the Union, I would rather take the name from the soil, a good Indian name.

Mr. WADE. Suggest one and I will agree to it[.]

Mr. SUMNER. I am not familiar enough with the country to do so.

Mr. HOWARD. I will say to the Senator from Massachusetts that I was equally puzzled when I saw the name in the bill, and I labored under the same difficulty which my honorable friend from Massachusetts seems to be in. I was obliged to turn to my old Latin dictionary to see if there was any meaning to the word Montana, and I found there was.

Mr. SUMNER. What was it?

Mr. HOWARD. It is a very classical word, pure Latin. It means mountainous region, a mountainous country.

Mr. WADE: Then the name is well adapted to the Territory.

Mr. HOWARD: You will find it is used by Livy and some of the other Latin historians, which is no small praise.

Mr. WADE: I do not care anything about the name. If there was none in Latin or in Indian I suppose we have a right to make a name; certainly just as good a right to make it as anybody else. It is a good name enough.

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Sources:

“By Telegraph.” Buffalo Morning Express (New York), 4 March 1863, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

“House of Representatives.” Albany Journal (New York), 12 February 1863, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1933, s.v. montanus, adj.

Malone, Michael P. and Richard B. Roeder. Montana: A History of Two Centuries. Seattle: U of Washington Press, 1976, 95–96. Google Books.

Milwaukee Sentinel (Wisconsin), 24 February 1864, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Montana Indians Their History and Location.” Montana Office of Public Instruction, Division of Indian Education, April 2009.

“Territory of Montana,” 31 March 1864. The Congressional Globe, Thirty-Eighth Congress, First Session, 1 April 1864, 1362.

Image credit: Unknown photographer, Detroit Publishing Co., 1906. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

skid row / skid road / hit the skids

Skid row, Los Angeles, 2001. An urban street, littered with trash, with crowds of homeless people and their possessions lining the sidewalks.

11 November 2021

Skid row is a term for a run-down area of a town where the unemployed, vagrants, alcoholics, tend to congregate. It is American in origin. Most sources will point to the older skid road, a logging road that is “paved” with logs over which trees can be dragged, as the inspiration, but while skid road certainly was an influence, a more important influence was the phrase hit the skids.

In nineteenth-century logging lingo, a skid was a tree trunk laid perpendicular across a road over which logs could be dragged. We can see this use of skid in an 1851 book about forestry in Maine and New Brunswick:

In constructing this road, first all the underbrush is cut and thrown on one side; all trees standing in its range are cut close to the ground, and the trunks of prostrated trees cut off and thrown out, leaving a space from ten to twelve feet wide. The tops of the highest knolls are scraped off, and small poles, called skids, are laid across the road in the hollows between.

And we see skid road applied to a road that is paved with skids in the Morning Oregonian of 27 February 1877:

Some time during last season one putting in saw logs on the Weatherby place, for a long distance cross-laid the road with round timbers 10 to 12 inches in diameter placed about six feet apart and about half buried beneath the ground, making what loggers call a “skid road.” This does very well for hauling logs on, but not very interesting for wagons to pass over.

The use of skid road was particularly prevalent in the Pacific Northwest, undoubtedly due to that region’s heavy reliance on the logging industry.

But the association between skids and sliding garnered another sense, that of sliding into failure or defeat. We see this sense in baseball writing at the turn of the twentieth century in the phrase hit the skids, meaning to go into a slump. From an article in the Rockford Morning Star of 5 August 1906 about the world champion New York Giants:

Bowerman had his friends in the club, and they resented McGraw’s partiality toward Bresnahan. Ever since this incident the world’s champions have been arrayed into two factions, one bunch being with Bresnahan and the other being well-disposed toward Bowerman. The latter is a great hitter and catcher, and is giving McGraw the best he had in stock this season, but “insiders” regard it as significant that Sammy Mertes, one of Bowerman’s closest friends, was the first to hit the “skids” when McGraw started out to say that Roger [Bresnahan] can discount Bowerman with the bat.

Two years later, the Giants were in another slump. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of 18 May 1908:

New York seems to have hit the skids for Cellarville or near it. Cincinnati is playing improved ball and Wiltse could not hold the Reds in check yesterday.

And by 1921 we start to see skid row being used to refer to the section of a city where those who have hit the skids and become homeless congregate. From Almira Bailey’s 1921 Vignettes of San Francisco:

They say that San Francisco is the known all over as the Port O’ Missing Men. That is, a city where a man may lose himself if he chooses, and that by the same token it is a good place to look for my wandering boy tonight. I can believe all this especially on Third street. Third street should be called by some other name or it should have a nickname. If it were Seattle it would be known as “skid row.” Third street doesn’t describe it at all.

When I see a lot of men like that, wanderers, family men out of work, vagabonds, nobodies, somebodies, “rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor, lawyer, merchant chief,” I always get to thinking how once each one was a tiny baby in a thin white dress, and how before that each one was born of a woman.

It’s clear from reading these paragraphs that Bailey did not coin skid row and that it was in use in Seattle, if not elsewhere as well. The earlier use of skid road may have played a part in the coining or the popularity of skid row. And any use in Seattle may have especially been influenced by the logging term, given that industry’s importance to the region. But the more apropos metaphor remains that of hitting the skids and being down on one’s luck.

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Sources:

Bailey, Almira. Vignettes of San Francisco. San Francisco: San Francisco Journal, 1921, 21. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. skid road, n.

“Giants Have Slump.” Rockford Morning Star (Illinois), 5 August 1906, 10. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. skid row, n., skids, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. skid row, n., skid, n.

“The Road Down the River.” Morning Oregonian (Portland), 27 February 1877, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Sidelights on the Game.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 18 May 1908, 10. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Springer, John S. Forest Life and Forest Trees. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851, 84. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: The Erica Chang, 2001. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

skedaddle

A memeified frame from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail depicting King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table skedaddling from the killer rabbit. The meme’s caption reads “Run away! Run Away!!”

10 November 2021

To skedaddle is to run away. The word rose to prominence in American slang during the US Civil War, but it probably has roots in English dialectal speech. Those roots, however, are not quite certain. Various Greek, Celtic, and Nordic etymologies have been proposed over the years, but with little to no evidence to support them.

Anatoly Liberman posits that it is a variant of the English dialect term scaddle—meaning wild, frisky, or to scare, frighten—with infix -da- added. And indeed, Francis Grose’s Provincial Glossary of 1787 has this entry:

Scaddle. That will not abide touching; spoken of young horses that fly out. In Kent, scaddle means thievish, rapacious. Dogs, apt to steal or snatch any thing that comes their way, are there said to be scaddle.

Liberman’s informed speculation is the most plausible explanation available. Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary of 1906 has entries for both scaddle and for skedaddle, but provides no citations for the latter that predate American use of the term. So, this explanation is possible, but by no means certain.

The earliest recorded use of skedaddle is in the Wellsboro Pennsylvania newspaper The Agitator on 12 January 1860, shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. It appears in a humorous story about a traveler who arrives in a town shortly after a steamboat, the Franklin, suffered a boiler explosion with many casualities. Mistakenly thinking that he was on the boat, the townspeople are solicitous and go out of their way to make sure he is well and has all that he needs:

“Where did you find yourself after the ’splosion?”

“In a flat boat,” sez I.

“How far from the Frankling?” sez he.

“Why[”] sez I, “I never seed her, but as nigh as I can guess, about three hundred and seventy-five miles.”

“You’d oughter seen that gang skedaddle.”

And we get this note in Baltimore’s American and Commercial Advertiser of 21 October 1861, about fighting early in the war. The Baltimore paper says it is from the New York Post, but I have not found that earlier article:

“SKADADDLE.”—The Washington correspondent of one of the morning papers informs us that the German soldiers have christened the Rebel earthworks back of Munson’s Hill “Fort Skadaddle.”

For the benefit of future etymologists, who may have a dictionary to make out when the English language shall have adopted “skadaddle” into familiar use by the side of “employee” and “telegram,” we here define the new term.

It is at least an error of judgment, if not an intentional unkindness, to foist “skadaddle” on our Teutonic soldiers[.] The word is used throughout the whole army of the Potomac, and means “to cut slack,” “vamose the ranche,” “slope,” “cut your lucky,” or “clear out”—So that Fort Skadaddle is equivalent to the “Fort Runaway.”

A raft of uses of the term quickly follows, as the word gains traction throughout both armies. Of note, is this from San Francisco’s Steamer Bulletin of 11 September 1862 that uses skedaddle as a noun:

SPORT.—Gentlemen who live in Carson Valley state there are great quantities of trout in the river, returning to the sink from the mountain streams. Their skedaddle is caused by the falling of the stream and the fact that the season of incubation has passed. Persons living on the stream catch great numbers of them with the seine or hook, and literally feast on the luxury of fresh trout three times a day.

And by 1865 we get skedaddler, one who runs away, a coward. It appears in A New Pantomime by Irish writer Edward Kenealy. Green’s Dictionary of Slang mistakenly dates this to 1850, when the first version of the work was published, but it is not until the 1865 revised version that skedaddler appears in it. It’s in an exchange of insults, a sort of modern-day flyting:

Bow-legged Boozer, Ape, Apostate,
Chicken-hearted Maffler, Grub,
Numskull, Slanderer, base Skeadaddler,
Dare you thus a lady snub?

There we have it. Skedaddle rose to prominence during the US Civil War. It likely has its origins in English dialect, but we can’t be certain of that.

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Sources:

The Agitator (Wellsboro, Pennsylvania), 12 January 1860, 1. NewspaperArchive.

American and Commercial Advertiser (Baltimore), 21 October 1861, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. skedaddle, v.

Grose, Francis. A Provincial Glossary. London: S. Hooper, 1787. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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Image credit: Python (Monty) Pictures, 1975, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (film), Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, directors. Fair use of a single, low-resolution frame from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.