tinsel

December 14, 2021

14 December 2021

Today we know tinsel as the shiny, faux-metallic strips that are used to decorate Christmas trees and other holiday displays. Originally metal threads, tinsel is now usually made from plastic. The word comes from the Middle French étincelle, which in turn is from the Old French estincelle and then from the Latin scintilla, meaning spark. The initial <e> was dropped (via aphesis) either in later Middle French or soon after it was borrowed into English.

Tinsel originally referred to cloth interwoven with gold or silver thread. Here we have an example from c.1448 of horse with such a covering:

And wher that it was so that on John Gladman of Norwich which was ever and at this oure is a man of sad disposicion and true and fethful to God and to the King, of disporte as is and ever hath ben accustomed in ony Cite or Burgh thrugh al this reame on fastyngong tuesday made a disporte w[ith] his neighburghs having his hors trapped with tyneseyle and otherwyse dysgysyn things crowned as King of Kristmesse in token that all merthe shuld end with ye twelve monthes of ye yer.
(And where it was so, one John Gladman of Norwich, who was ever and at this hour is a man of steadfast disposition and true and faithful to God and to the King, of amusement as is and ever has been accustomed in any city or borough throughout all this realm, on Shrove Tuesday made an amusement with his neighbors having his horse draped with tinsel and other ostentatious things crowned as King of Christmas in token that all mirth should end with the twelve months of the year.)

Use of tinsel to refer to the thread itself comes a bit later. Here is an example from Thomas Nashe’s 1596 Have with You to Saffron-Walden, or Gabriell Harueys Hunt is Up. The piece was written as part of the Martin Marprelate affair. An anonymous writer using that pseudonym (probably Job Throckmorton) wrote a series of pamphlets attacking the Anglican Church and its bishops, and a series of pamphlets on both sides of the controversy were penned by various writers. In Nashe’s case, his involvement developed into a feud with Gabriel Harvey. In this piece, Nashe is responding to something Harvey wrote about him. I include the extended quotation because it is a superb example of the insulting tone of the whole affair:

Amongst the which number, is a red bearded thrid-bare Caualier; who (in my hearing) at an ordinarie, as he sat fumbling the dice after supper, fell into these tearmes, (no talke before leading him to it) There is such a Booke of Harueys (meaning this his last Booke against mee) as I am a Souldiour and a Gentleman I protest, I neuer met with the like contriued pile of pure English. O it is deuine and most admirable, & so farre beyond all that euer he published heretofore, as day-light beyond candle-light, or tinsell or leafe-gold aboue arsedine; with a great many more excessiue praises he bestowed vpon it: which authentically I should haue beleeued, if immediately vpon the nicke of it, I had not seene him shrug his shoulders, and talk of going to the Bathe, and after like a true Pandar (so much the fitter to be one of Gabriels Patrons) grew in commending to yong gentlemen, two or three of the most detested loathsom whores about London, for peereles beauteous Paragons, & the pleasingest wenches in the world; wherby I guest, his iudgment might be infected as wel as his body: & he that wold not stick so to extoll stale rotten lac'd mutton, will like a true Millanoys sucke figges out of an asses fundament, or doo anie thing.
(Amongst that number is a red-bearded, threadbare cavalier, who (in my hearing) at a tavern, as he sat fumbling the dice after supper, fell into these terms (no talk before leading him to it). There is such a book of Harveys (meaning his last book against me), as I am a soldier and a gentleman I protest, I never met with such a contrived pile of pure English. O it is divine and most admirable, & so far beyond all that he published heretofore, as daylight is beyond candlelight, or tinsel or goldleaf is above arsedine, with a great many more excessive praises he bestowed upon it: which authentically I should have believed, if immediately upon the nick of it, I had not seen him shrug his shoulders and talk of going to the Bathe, and after like a true panderer (so much the fitter to be one of Gabriel’s patrons) grew in commanding to young gentlemen, two or three of the most detested, loathsome whores about London as if they were peerless, beauteous paragons and the most pleasing wenches in the world. Whereby I guessed his judgment might be infected as well as his body, & and he would not stick to so extol stale, rotten mutton, would like a true Millanoys suck figs* out of a donkey’s ass, or do anything.

*What figges means here is obscure. The word can plausibly mean literal figs, hemorrhoids, or worthless things.

And around the same time, tinsel came to denote something that was showy and ostentatious, but ultimately worthless. From Jeremy Taylor’s 1660 Doctor Dubitantium:

There is more gold now then before, but it is more allayed in the running, or so hidden in heaps of tinsel, that when men are best pleased, now adays they are most commonly cozened.

The association of tinsel with Christmas was in place by the end of the eighteenth century. There is this from a 13 January 1797 letter by Horatio Walpole:

Pray send me no more such laurels, which I desire no more than their leaves when decked with a scrap of tinsel, and stuck on twelfth-cakes that lie on the shop-boards of pastry-cooks at Christmas.

And this from Eleanor Moore’s 1819 novel Eveleen Monjoy:

This ceremony was followed by the arrival of several “Carollers,” an assemblage of old women and children, singing Christmas hymns, some of whom carried a little box containing a waxen virgin and child, reposing on cotton wool, holly berries and tinsel.

Speaking of showy and ostentatious, Hollywood has been dubbed Tinseltown. That nickname dates to the 1930s. Here’s an example from Ontario’s Windsor Daily Star of 5 January 1938 that also goes in for body-shaming women, another feature Hollywood is known for:

MILDRED HARRIS CHAPLIN, former wife of the film comedian, is shown as she impersonated Greta Garbo on the stage of a Philadelphia burlesque theatre during a recent engagement there. She denies she’s making a “comeback,” and says her ambition is to be a radio singer. Plumper than in the old glamorous days, she defends that on the grounds she’s healthier than most girls. And she’s writing a book, to be called “Tinseltown, or the City of Lost Angels,” and it’s about Hollywood.

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Sources:

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

Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330-1500), ATILF - CNRS & Université de Lorraine, 2020, s.v. étincelle.

“Ex-Mrs. Chaplin as Garbo” (photo caption). Windsor Daily Star (Ontario), 5 January 1938, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Hudson, William and John Cottingham Tingey, eds. “Presentments Connected with the Foregoing Disturbances Prepared Against Tudenham, Heydon and Others, c. 1448.” The Records of the City of Norwich, vol. 1 of 2. Norwich: Jarrold and Sons, 1906, 345. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. tinsel n.3.

Moore, Eleanor (Mrs. Robert). Eveleen Monjoy: or, Views of Life, vol. 2 of 4.. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819, 228. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Nashe, Thomas. Have with You to Saffron-Walden, or Gabriell Harueys Hunt is Up. London: John Danter, 1596, sig. G2r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tinsel, n.3 and adj.

Taylor, Jeremy. Doctor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience. London, James Flesher for Richard Royston, 1660, 164. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Walpole, Horatio. “Letter XXII” (13 January 1797). The Works of Horatio Walpole, vol. 5 of 5. London: G.G. and J. Robinson and J. Edwards, 1798, 675. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Image credit: unknown photograph, Germany, c.1975. Public domain image.

screw / Scrooge

December 13, 2021

Ebenezer Scrooge visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present. An illustration from an 1843 edition of Dickens’s *A Christmas Carol*. A bearded man in a green fur suit and head adorned with holly holds aloft a flaming torch and gestures to a man in Victorian nightclothes. Around them are food and drink for a Christmas feast. The caption reads, “Scrooge’s third Visitor.”

13 December 2021

A scrooge is a miser, a stingy person. And most of us recognize that the word comes from the name of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol. The transition from character name to general term for a miser was astoundingly quick; it took less than a year for the generalized sense of scrooge to catch on. But few people today realize that in coining his character’s name Dickens was making a play on words, in particular on a couple of slang senses of screw. For when Dickens wrote the story, screw was slang for a miser, and to screw meant to extort rent from a tenant. The speed at which Ebenezer Scrooge became simply a scrooge was due not just to the popularity of Dickens’s story but also to the fact the name relied on the existing slang screw.

This slang use of screw dates to the mid seventeenth century. It appears in William Cartwright’s play The Ordinary, written sometime before 1643. The underlying metaphor is that of applying pressure:

Why, I’ve heard say
You’re wont to skrew your wretched Tenants up
To th’ utmost farthing, and then stand upon
The third Rent Capon.

And Richard Alestree’s 1658 The Practice of Christian Graces has this:

And thus also it is often with exacting Landlords, who when their poor tenants know not how to provide themselves elsewhere, rack and skrew them beyond the worth of the thing.

The noun screw, meaning a miser, comes along later, in the early nineteenth century. Bernard Blackmantle’s 1825 The English Spy has this dialogue where a cabbie describes the generous and not-so-generous tippers in town:

A hand-some chariot, with a most divine little creature in the inside, and a good-looking roué, with huge mustachios, first attracted my notice: “that is the golden Ball,” said coachee, “and his new wife; he often rolls down this road for a day or two—spends his cash like an emperor—and before he was tied up used to tip pretty freely for handling the ribbons, but that's all up now, for Mamsell Mercandotti finds him better amusement. A gemman who often comes down with me says his father was a slopseller in Ratcliffe Highway, and afterwards marrying the widow of Admiral Hughes, a rich old West India nabob, he left this young gemman the bulk of his property, and a very worthy fellow he is: but we’ve another rich fellow that’s rather notorious at Brighton, which we distinguish by the name of the silver Ball, only he’s a bit of a screw, and has lately got himself into a scrape about a pretty actress, from which circumstance they have changed his name to the Foote Ball.

And William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, published in 1848, five years after Dickens invented Ebenezer Scrooge, uses screw thusly:

This gentleman and the guard seemed to know Sir Pitt very well, and laughed at him a great deal. They both agreed in calling him an old screw; which means a very stingy, avaricious person. He never gives any money to any body, they said.

So, when it came time to create a name for his miser, Dickens came up with Scrooge, a name that would evoke the slang term. Here is what may be the most famous passage describing Ebenezer Scrooge’s penurious nature, in which Scrooge says the poor belong in the prisons and workhouses that the taxes he paid built:

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

Within a year of the 1843 publication of A Christmas Carol, people were already using scrooge as a generic term for a miser. From the Boston, Massachusetts Christian Register of 19 October 1844, a description of a man seen from a window:

His eyes are dull, or if they are ever lighted up, it is with a twinkle that only silver and gold can excite. As to his mouth, humor has not developed a trace about it. It is a mere “fissure in his face.” The entire frame of the man appears like a machine for counting coppers. His whole demeanor seems to say—“I had so many dollars this morning; to-night may I have so many more or die; get one of them out of my grasp, if you can.” He is a perfect Scrooge of a man,—a Scrooge such as Scrooge was at sunset, Christmas eve, not as he was at dinner, Christmas day.

And from 19 April 1847, here is a description of the inhabitants of New Bedford, Massachusetts that appeared in the Gloucester Telegraph of 24 April:

New Bedford, with her princely mansions,—(John Quincy Adams, when here a couple of years since, remarked, that in all his travels, he had nowhere seen so many beautiful ones in a place of its size and population)—and private gardens, her well laid streets, shaded as great many of them are by stately trees, together with her public buildings and elegant churches, is certainly a handsome city. All this is very pleasant, but there is a coldness, a stiffness, an exclusiveness, or something of the sort, that a stranger is not long in discovering to pervade the people; and it may be, induce him to exclaim—“What fit region for a Scrooge to live in—there are no Christmas days here!”

Not only is A Christmas Carol a beloved Christmas story, but the name Scrooge provides a lesson in how proper names can become slang—it helps if the name is patterned on an already existing slang term.

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Sources:

Alestree, Richard. The Practice of Christian Graces. London: D. Maxwell for T. Garthwait, 1658, 234. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Blackmantle, Bernard [Charles Molloy Westmacott]. The English Spy. London: Sherwood Jones, 1825, 284–85. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cartwright, William. The Ordinary, a Comedy. London: Humphrey Mosely, 1651, 5.3, 78–79. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. John Leech, illustrator. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843, 13–14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Friend Rogers” (19 April 1847). Gloucester Telegraph (Massachusetts), 24 April 1847, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Glimpse from a City Window.” Christian Register (Boston, Massachusetts), 19 October 1844, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, modified September 2021, s.v. screw, n.1; second edition, 1989, s.v. Scrooge, n.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1848, 40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: John Leech, 1843.

mistletoe

December 10, 2021

10 December 2021

Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant of the order Santalales, especially European mistletoe (Viscum album). A hemiparasitic plant derives water and nutrients from its host plant but retains some capacity for photosynthesis itself. The word is from the Old English mistel (mistletoe) + tan (twig). Mistil, mistel, and mistiltan appear in a number of Latin–Old English glossaries, and the form mistelta appears in the twelfth-century Durham Plant Glossary. Tan could also mean toes (singular ta), so that explains how misteltan became mistletoe in the transition to Middle English. The shorter form mistle can still be found, chiefly in Scottish dialect.

Traditionally, mistletoe was thought to have medicinal, and even magical, powers. Today, the plant is commonly used as a Yuletide holiday decoration, and one tradition is that when two people are found standing underneath hanging mistletoe they must kiss. The earliest references to the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe that I have found date to the late eighteenth century, although there are certain to be older ones. Nor do I know how the association of kissing with mistletoe began. (I’m an expert at searching for words and usages, not folklore and traditions.) There is this from a song in George Colman’s 1784 play Two to One:

When at Christmas in the hall
     The men and maids are hopping,
If by chance I hear ’em bawl,
     Amongst ’em quick I pop in.
When all the men, Jem, John and Joe,
     Cry, “What good luck has sent ye?”
And kiss beneath the mistletoe
     The girl not turn’d of twenty.

The poem Approach of Christmas appeared in the London Times of 24 December 1787:

The pendant mistletoe hung up to view,
Reminds the youth, the duty youth should do;
While titt’ring maidens, to enhance their wishes,
Entice the men to smother them with kisses.

Washington Irving records the following in his 1819 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Irving is an American writer, but here he is writing about Christmas traditions in England:

As we approached the house, we heard the sound of music, and now and then a burst of laughter, from one end of the building. This, Bracebridge said, must proceed from the servants’ hall, where a great deal of revelry was permitted, and even encouraged, by the squire, throughout the twelve days of Christmas, provided every thing was done conformably to ancient usage. Here were kept up the old games of hoodman blind, shoe the wild mare, hot cockles, steal the white loaf, Bob apple, and snap dragon: the Yule clog [sic], and Christmas candle, were regularly burnt, and the misletoe [sic], with its white berries, hung up, to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids.*
*The misletoe is still hung up in farm houses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases.

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Sources:

“Approach of Christmas.” Times (London), 24 December 1787, 3. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Colman, George, Jr.. Songs, Duets, Trios, &c. in the New Comedy of Two to One, third edition. London: T. Cadell, 1784, 25. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. New York: C.S. Van Winkle, 1819, 379. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2002, modified September 2021, s.v. mistletoe, n.; modified June 2021, s.v. mistle, n.

Image credit: Alex Brown, 2014. Public domain image.

Kris Kringle

December 3, 2021

1893 German illustration of the Christkindl (Christ child) bringing gifts on Christmas Eve. A host of angels carrying the Christ child, a Christmas tree, and gifts, descends upon a snow-covered roof, while two children open a window to let them in. A candle-lit church is in the background.

3 December 2021

Kris Kringle is another name for Santa Claus. The name is a variation on the German Christkind, or Christkindl (Christ-child), a traditional gift-bringer at Christmas-time in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere. The alteration of the name into English happened in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the tradition, brought to the Americas by German immigrants, collided with the English language.

The earliest conflation of the Christkindl with Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas that I can find is in an 1828 collection of New York traditions by a John F. Watson:

The Dutch kept five festivals, of peculiar notoriety, in the year—say, Kerstydt, (Christmas); Nieuw jar, (New Year,) a great day of cake; Paas, (the Passover); Pinxter, (i.e., Whitsuntide); and San Claas, (i.e. Saint Nicholas, or Christ-kinkle day.)

We see the Kris Kringle spelling by 1841, as evidenced by this advertisement for children’s books that appeared in Philadelphia’s Christian Observer on 3 December 1841:

J. Whetham & Son, 144 Chestnut st., opposite the Theatre, have constantly on hand and for all the latest and most interesting juvenile books. Among their large assortment are the following:
The Kris Kringle’s Book, or the Book of St. Nicholas—Merry’s Moral Tales—The Land Without the Sabbath—Samuel Wisdom [...]

And there is this over-the-top sententious story by James Rees that appears in his 1849 Mysteries of City Life:

Their daughter now spoke. “Mother, I have tied my stocking to that big nail near the fire place, do you think KRIS KRINGLE will come down the chimney to-night?”
“O, sister, what nonsense,” quickly replied the boy, “how can such a huge figure as he is represented get down our poor chimney!”
“That is it, my child—it is because we are poor. Poverty keeps from the humble door all the bright things of the earth, except virtue, truth, and religion, these are more of heaven than of earth, and are the poor man's friend in his hours of adversity.”
“Then, father, I will take my stocking down, I thought, indeed, mother, I thought that Santa Claus and Kris Kringle loved all those who are good, and have not I been good? I know my lesson, I love you, mother, and my brother dearly, and do whatever I am told.”

So, by the mid nineteenth century, the transition from Christ child to Santa Claus was complete, and Kris Kringle was just another name for the right jolly old elf.

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Sources:

“New Juvenile Books” (advertisement). Christian Observer (Philadelphia), 3 December 1841, 195. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Kris Kringle, n.

Rees, James. Mysteries of City Life. Philadelphia: J.W. Moore, 1849, 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Watson, John F. “Appendix: Containing Olden Time Researches and Reminiscences of New York City” (1828). Annals of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: E.L. Carey and A. Hart, 1830, 37. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: unknown artist, Stadt Gottes, 1893. Public domain image.

SOS

December 2, 2021

*RMS Titanic* as it is leaving Southampton on 10 April 1912. The *Titanic* was the first ship to issue an *SOS* distress call. Black and white photograph of a large steamship with four funnels.

2 December 2021

The universal distress call SOS was chosen because it is easy to transmit via Morse code. It is not an acronym, and the letters do not stand for anything, but over the years many have interpreted it to mean save our souls or save our ship.

The call was adopted by the International Radiotelegraphic Convention of 1906, which went into effect in 1908. The relevant portion of the convention reads:

Ships in distress make use of the following signal:—
- - - — — — - - -
repeated at short intervals.

Morse code for <s> is three dots, and for <o> three dashes, so the signal can be read as SOS, but the convention text itself does not mention the letters.

The first published use of the term SOS, not the actual transmission of it as a distress call, that I have found was following the 23 January 1909 collision between the steamships Florida and Republic off Nantucket, Massachusetts that resulted in the Republic sinking. In this instance, the first time a wireless distress call had been sent by a ship at sea, the radio operator onboard the Republic used the older distress code CQD (the Florida had no wireless capability). Six lives were lost in the collision, but the radio distress call and timely response undoubtedly saved many lives.

This first use of the term SOS was in a letter published by the journal The Electrician on 5 February 1909. The letter was in response to an article in the 23 January issue that had contended that if the International Radiotelegraph Convention of 1906 had not been in force, there would have been much greater loss of life:

What the Radio telegraphic Convention had to do with incident is not evident. The Radio telegraphic Convention is not in force in the United States to begin with, and the operator Binns preferred to put his trust in the “C.Q.D.” of the Marconi organisation rather than employ the arbitrary and as yet unfamiliar, “S.O.S.” of the Convention.

Another early use of the term SOS was in the 1910 edition of J.A. Fleming’s The Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy and Telephony. Fleming repeats the words of the 1906 convention and then adds this footnote:

This signal, S, O, S, has superseded the Marconi Company’s original high sea cry for help, which was C, Q, D.

This passage and footnote are not in the earlier 1906 or 1908 editions of the book.

The first time an SOS signal was sent by a ship in distress was famously by the RMS Titanic, which sank on 15 April 1912. The Titanic had broadcast a number of CQD messages, but in its final distress call the radio operator used the SOS call. This fact was reported in any number of newspapers throughout the English-speaking world. This one is from The Sacramento Bee on the day of the sinking:

The Titanic’s first “S.O.S.” message was received by the Allan liner Virginian, which, according to the position given by the Titanic’s operator was not more than 170 miles away.
[...]
Immediate inquiry by the Associated Press in an urgent dispatch to the Marconi Station at Cape Race was answered soon afterward in the following words:
“At 10:25 last night the steamer called “C.Q.D.” and reported having struck an iceberg. The steamer said that immediate aid was required. Half an hour afterwards another message came reporting they were sinking by the head, and that women were being put off in the lifeboats.”

The association of SOS with save our souls, and also CQD with come quickly danger, came in the wake of loss of the Titanic. The following exchange took place when Guglielmo Marconi gave testimony to the British Wreck Commissioner’s Court on 18 June 1912:

Commissioner: Who made the change?
Marconi: The International Convention on Wireless Telegraphy held at Berlin in 1906
Commissioner: They made the change?
Marconi: They made the change
Commissioner: Of CQD to SOS?
Marconi: Yes
Commissioner: What does SOS stand for, anything, or is it simply three letters?
Marconi: Simply three letters, my Lord
Commissioner: I understand that CQD stood for “Come quick, danger”?
Marconi: It can be interpreted that way
Attorney-General: It really is an easy way to remember it, and SOS is, I am told, “Save our souls” It is simply an easy way to remember it?
Marconi: That is so.

Note that Marconi is being very politic. He, of all people, knows the letters do not officially stand for anything, but he is not about to contradict the belief of the commissioner

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Sources:

Fleming, J. A. The Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy and Telephony, second edition. London: Longmans, Green, 1910, 882. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Mammoth Liner Hits an Iceberg on First Voyage.” Sacramento Bee (California), 15 April 1912, 1, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. S.O.S., n.

Radiotelegraphic Convention. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 29 November 1906, 34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Wireless Telegraphy on Board Ship” (letter). The Electrician, 5 February 1909, 835. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wreck Commissioner’s Court. Formal Investigation into the Loss of the S.S. “Titanic,” vol. 7. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1912, 672. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Francis Godolphin Osbourne Stuart, 1912. Public domain image.