Delaware

January 13, 2022

13 January 2022

Delaware is the name of a bay, a river, a state of the United States, and an Indigenous people. The use as a name for an Indigenous people is an oddity in that the name comes from that of an Englishman. The name Delaware comes from Thomas West (1577–1618), Baron De La Warr, and the governor of Virginia (1609–15).* The Lenape people were called the Delaware Indians by settler-colonists because they originally resided in the Delaware River valley; the name stuck and has been adopted by some Lenape tribes and communities as their official name.

First European settlement in what is now the state was in 1638 by the Swedes and was dubbed New Sweden. The Dutch took it from the Swedes in 1655 and the English from the Dutch in 1664. Originally part of Pennsylvania, the area formed its own assembly in 1704 and was administered separately from the rest of that colony, although the governor of Pennsylvania was also the governor of Delaware. The colony did not achieve full autonomy from Pennsylvania until independence from Britain in 1776.

The bay was the first thing to be named for West. The name appears by 1635 in a description of the colony of Maryland:

On the Easterne shore of the Country, which lieth upon the maine Ocean, are sundry small Creekes, and one likely to proove a very commodious harbour, called Matsopongue; neere the mouth whereof, lieth an Iland of about 20 miles in length, and thence about 6 leagues more Northerly, another Iland called Chingoto; and about seaven leagues beyond that, to the North, opens another very large faire Bay, called Delaware Bay. This Bay is about 8 leagues wide at the entrance, and into it, there falls a very faire navigable River.

Subsequently, the river that feeds into the bay was also given that name.

The application of the name to Indigenous people is in place by 1694, as can be seen in an exchange between Benjamin Fletcher, captain-general and governor of New York, and Sadekanacktie, an Onandaga chief. Note here the name is not designating a tribal affiliation, but rather to the fact that they live along the Delaware River, although it is likely the people referred to here as Delaware Indians were all or mostly Lenape:

His Excellency,
The Senekes of late have sent a Belt of Wampum to the Indians of Delaware River, requiring them to take up the Hatchet of War, and fight along with them, which frightened those peaceable Indians, that live among a peaceable People, who are no Warriours. And since they are in my Government of Pennsilvania, I charge the Senekes not to frighten them, but to let them alone.
Sadekanacktie,
We know nothing of any such Belt sent by us, probably those Indians that are fled from us, and live upon the Snsquahannah [sic] River may have sent such a Message.
His Excellency,
I injoyn you, in renewing the Peace with those Indians, to let them know, that they must not disturb the Delaware Indians, nor the Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsilvania.

By 1709 we see groups of Lenape people explicitly referred to as Delawares. Note that by this point, most of the people being called Delaware no longer lived in the Delaware River valley, but at the time were mostly resident along the Susquehanna River, the first stage in a relocation that would take them to what is now Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario, although some Lenape communities remain in their original homeland to this day. From a list of attendees at a council held at Philadelphia on 25 July 1709:

The Chiefs of Several nations of the Indians living on Susquehannagh, viz: Andaggy-junquagh, Woshtachary, —— Chiefs of the Mingoes, Owechela, Passakassy, Sassoonan & Skalitchy, Chiefs of the Delaware Indians, settled at Peshtang above Conestogoe & other adjacent places, [...]

The use of Delaware to refer to the state comes rather late. Throughout its colonial history, the territory was referred to as the Lower Counties on the Delaware, reflecting its status as relating to, but distinct from, the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, which disputed ownership of the territory. The territory was not officially referred to as Delaware until after independence. The proceedings for the Continental Congress of 24 January 1777 read, in part:

A letter of the 17th instant from John McKinley, esquire, speaker of the assembly of the state of Delaware with sundry resolves of that assembly, was read.

Delaware would become the first state to ratify the Constitution.

*The nomenclature and numbering of Thomas West’s title are confused in many sources. The title Baron De La Warr was created in 1299, lapsed in 1554, and then recreated in 1572, so this Thomas West is either the twelfth or third baron, depending upon how one counts. Some sources also confuse him with his father, also Thomas West, the eleventh or second baron. Furthermore, while West was technically the first governor of Virginia, he was preceded by a governing council, so some sources credit him as the second governor.

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Sources:

An Account of the Treaty Between His Excellency Benjamin Fletcher, Captain General and Governour in Chief of the Province of New-York, &c. and the Indians of the Five Nations. New York: William Bradford, 1694, 27. Early English Books Online.

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

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

Grumet, Robert S. Manhattan to Minisink: American Indian Place Names in Greater New York and Vicinity. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2013.

Journals of Congress, vol. 3, Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1778, 34. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. 2 of 16. Philadelphia, Joseph Severns, 1852, 469. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

A Relation of Maryland. London: 1635, 15–16. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image Credit: Robert Hinshelwood, c.1872, published by D.Appleton and Co. of New York. Library of Congress.

Oklahoma

January 12, 2022

12 January 2022

Oklahoma is an Indigenous name, but it is not a traditional name for the region. Rather, it was coined in 1866 by Allen Wright, born Kiliahote, principal chief of the Choctaw Nation. The name Oklahoma is formed from the Choctaw (Muskogean) words oklah (people) + homma (red) and was created in the context of the forced resettlement of Indigenous peoples to the region.

The inhabitants of the region now known as Oklahoma at the time of first contact with Europeans included the Plains Apache, Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita peoples.

The name Oklahoma is first recognized in print in an 1866 treaty between the United States and the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. Wright was one of the negotiators for the Choctaw:

And it is further agreed that the superintendent of Indian affairs shall be the executive of the said territory, with the title of “governor of the Territory of Oklahoma.”

In 1828, the US Congress had set aside the land that would become Oklahoma for Indigenous peoples, and eventually over sixty tribes were forcibly resettled there. In 1889, the United States reneged on its agreements and opened the territory to settlement by white people. Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in 1907.

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

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

“Official. Department of State.” Daily Morning Chronicle (Washington, DC), 20 July 1866, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, modified March 2019, s.v. Oklahoma, n.

Image credit: Uyvsdi, 2007. Public domain image.

mind your Ps and Qs

January 11, 2022

A Rwandan teacher instructing young children how to read. A woman and three children in front of an open book. The woman is reading aloud, pointing at the words on the page.

11 January 2022

To mind one’s p’s and q’s is to be on one’s best behavior, to mind one’s manners. The phrase appears in the mid eighteenth century. The origin is not known for certain, but the most plausible explanation is that it comes from teaching reading and writing, in that children often have difficulty distinguishing the lowercase <p> from <q>. While there is evidence to support this explanation, it is by no means certain that learning to read is the metaphor underlying the origin.

But before I get to the eighteenth century uses, there are some seventeenth century uses of p and q that might be precursors to the phrase we know today. A couple of these are false leads, but a couple could possibly be related.

The two false leads appear in plays by Thomas Dekker. The first is in his 1602 Satiro-mastix. In this exchange between a character and his servant, pee and kue refer to a coat. The pee is a reference to pea-cloth, a coarse woolen fabric. This use of pee dates to the early fifteenth century—today pea-cloth and pea-jackets are associated with sailors, but this association did not exist in the seventeenth century. The kue is a reference to the coat’s tails. Horace’s pee and kue is a woolen coat with tails:

Asi[nius]. If you flye out Ningle, heer's your Cloake; I thinke it raine too.
Ho[race]. Hide my shoulders in't.
Asi. Troth so th'adst neede, for now thou art in thy Pee and Kue; thou hast such a villanous broad backe, that I warrant th'art able to beare away any mans iestes in England.

The second is in West-Ward Hoe, a 1607 play Dekker wrote in collaboration with John Webster. In the play, the character Justiniano poses as a writing instructor for three women in order to arrange meetings between the women and their lovers without their husbands suspecting. In the scene in question, the husband of one the women, named Honeysuckle, has asked Justiniano how his wife is progressing:

Iusti[niano]. Sir so long as your mirth bee voyde of all Squirrility, tis not vnfit for your calling: I trust ere few daies bee at an end to haue her fal to her ioyning: for she has her letters ad vnguem: her A. her great B. and her great C. very right D. and E. dilicate: hir double F. of a good length, but that it straddels a little to wyde: at the G. very cunning.
Hony[suckle]. Her H. is full like mine: a goodly big H.
Iusti. But her: double LL is wel: her O. of a reasonable Size: at her p. and q. neither Marchantes Daughter, Aldermans Wife, young countrey Gentlewoman, nor Courtiers Mistris, can match her.

While the use of the alphabet here is filled with sexual innuendo, the letters p and q have no special significance. They are just letters. And the fact that this particular edition does not capitalize them like the other letters has no significance. That’s just the printer’s choice. This is a play, and how the words are spelled has no bearing on the performance or the audience’s reception.

A more mysterious appearance of P and Q is in a 1645 letter from Stephen Goffe to Henry Jermyn. Both men were active in the restoration of the monarchy during and after the English Civil War. Goffe writes:

If it be possible to provide money, it will prove an excellent Design, for the whole execution is to be disposed of by the King as absolutely as if they were English ships, and the Commanders English, the intention being not for P. and Q. but for honour and the service of the King,

What P and Q means here and how it might relate to the later phrase, if at all, is unknown. (At least to me. If anyone more knowledgeable about the period knows, please clue me in.)

Another mysterious, but more promising use is in Samuel Rowland’s 1612 poem “A Drunken Knave.” Here we still don’t know what pee and kew literally signify. The phrase pee and kew could refer to high quality or it could refer to speed:

Boy y’ are a villaine, didst thou ﬁll this Sacke?
Tis ﬂat you Rascall, thou hast plaid the Iacke,
Bring in a quart of Maligo, right true:
And looke, you Rogue, that it be Pee and Kew.
Some good Tobacco, quickly, and a light:
Sirrha: this same was mingled yesternight.
What Pipes are these? now take them broken vp,
Another Bowle, I doe not like this cup.

How these two seventeenth century passages relate to the present-day phrase, if they do at all, is just not known. My guess is that there is no connection.

It isn’t until the mid eighteenth century that we get the phrase mind your p’s and q’s itself. The meaning of the phrase is clear from the start, even if what the letters signify is not. It first appears in print in the 1756 Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates. In it, Bates is dispensing advice on how one should travel:

Mind your P’s and your Q’s, and always travel in the Autumn.—Away for Gloucester.—Brother Firelock.—Huzza, I wish I am not robb’d tho’!

(In his otherwise excellent Wordhistories.net, Pascal Tréguer attributes this line to a coachman who has just been tipped by Bates, but this is a misreading of how quotation marks were used in the eighteenth century. The line is spoken by Bates.)

Another appearance, several decades later, is in Thomas Francklin’s 1776 play The Contract. In a comic scene the characters of Colonel Lovemore and Eleanor Briggs, assisted by their two servants, feign courtship while actually detesting one another. Upon the two women’s approach, the Colonel’s servant, Martin, tells Lovemore to mind your p’s and q’s, to pay attention to the manners and customs, in this case of courtship. A bit later, Eleanor’s servant, Betty, tells her mistress to mind your cue. This latter use operates on several levels of meaning. It is an admonition to pay attention to the customs of courtship, and it could also be a dramatic cue, telling her mistress that it is time to say something they had planned. It is also sexual innuendo, cue standing in for quaint, an archaic, but still familiar to an eighteenth-century audience, euphemism for the female pudendum. Again, as this is a play to performed, the spelling is not significant:

Martin. Hush——Hush——methinks I hear the rustling of silks, mind your p’s and q’s, Sir, don’t forget your sighs and raptures now for heaven’s sake.
Colonel. Here she comes, egad.
Martin. (Peeping.) There the old fright is, sure enough: now, Sir, keep it up.
Colonel. O never fear me.
Enter Miss ELEANOR and BETTY.
Colonel. (Meeting Eleanor.) She comes, She comes the charmer of my heart—O, Eleanora! (They embrace.
Eleanor. My dearest Colonel, it is then given me once more to behold——O support me, or I die——he’s a horrid creature! (Aside to Betty.
Colonel. After so many years of tedious absence, again to look on those dear eyes, to taste these balmy lips. (Embrace again.) She stinks like a pole-cat. (Aside to Martin.
Eleanor. (Pushing him from her.) Fie, Colonel, I cannot bear it—Oh! it is too much!
Betty. (Aside.) It is indeed.
Colonel. (Turning to Martin.) O, Martin, this is insupportable!——
Martin. (Aside.) Very well, Sir, extremely well, keep it up.
Betty. (Aside.) Now, madam, mind your cue.
Eleanor. Colonel, I vow and protest I blush at my own behaviour, but excess of joy, betray’d me into a weakness unbecoming the delicacy of my sex.

(The closing parentheses in the stage directions that end a line are omitted in the 1776 printing, another eighteenth-century printing practice.)

The best evidence for an origin in reading and writing the letters <p> and <q> is in a couple of appearances in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. (Dekker and Webster’s use in West-Ward Hoe is not good evidence as it doesn’t call out those two letters specifically, but rather proceeds through the alphabet.) The first bit of evidence is from Charles Churchill’s 1763 poem The Ghost, in which he critiques Thomas Sheridan, an actor, educator, and proponent of “proper” speaking and writing. Sheridan was also the father to the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan:

He knows alone in proper mode
How to take vengeance on an Ode
And how to butcher AMMON’s Son,
And poor Jack Dryden both in one.
On all occasions next the Chair
He stands for service of the MAYOR,
And to instruct him how to use
His A’s, and B’s, and P’s, and Q’s.

While not the first use of Ps and Qs, it is quite early.

A somewhat later use in reference to writing is from the United States by British-born, pro-Federalist critic John Williams, writing under the pseudonym of Anthony Pasquin, in his c.1804 Hamiltoniad, in which he takes President Thomas Jefferson to task:

Would I were metamorphos’d to a Flea,
I’d hop to Washington, with cruel glee,
Steal in the galligaskins of our Chief,
And make his Excellency twist with grief;
Watch, when he wrote of Diplomatic news;
And make him careless of his P’s and Q’s.

(Galligaskin is a jocular term for hose or breeches.)

These appearances are by no means iron-clad evidence that mind your p’s and q’s comes from teaching people to read and write, but they provide better evidence than any other explanation has.

Other explanations, none of which have any real evidence to support them are:

From printers having difficulty distinguishing the lowercase letters <p> and <q>. While this is similar to the reading and writing explanation, there are no known uses of the phrase in the context of printing.
From tavern keepers tallying the pints and quarts consumed by customers. Again, no early uses are in this context.
From a sailor’s pea coat and pigtail, or queue. While we do have Dekker’s play that makes reference to a pea coat, none of the early uses are nautical in context.
It stands for prime quality. While this explanation might account for Rowlands’s 1612 use, it still doesn’t account for the use of the conjunction and in that appearance: mind your primes and qualities makes little sense.
It stands for pleases and thank yous. But that phrase doesn’t appear until the twentieth century, so this explanation is clearly a post-hoc rationalization.
It refers to pied and queue, terms from French referring to dance steps, but there are no instances of mind your pieds and queues or anything similar, nor are any of the early attestations in the context of dance.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Churchill, Charles. “The Ghost.” Poems. London: Dryden Leach, 1763, 351. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dekker, Thomas. Satiro-mastix. Or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet. London: Edward White, 1602, sig. E2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dekker, Thomas and John Webster. West-Ward Hoe. London: John Hodges, 1607, 2.1, sig. B4v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Francklin, Thomas. The Contract. Dublin: Price, et al., 1776, 1.1, 10–11. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Goffe, Stephen. Letter to Henry Jermyn, 24 April 1645. The Lord George Digby’s Cabinet. London: Edward Husband, 1646, 17. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates. London: Malachi *** for Edith Bates, 1756, 83. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Merriam-Webster.com, n.d., s.v. p’s and q’s, pl.n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2007, modified March 2021, s.v. P’s and Q’s, n.; modified June 2021, s.v. queue, n.; September 2005, modified December 2020, s.v. pee, n.1.

Pasquin, Anthony [John Williams]. The Hamiltoniad, or An Extinguisher for the Royal Faction of New England. Boston: 1804[?], 44–45. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Rowlands, Samuel. “A Drunken Knave.” The Knave of Harts. London: Thomas Snodham for George Loftus, 1612, sig. C2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Tréguer, Pascal. “The Multiple Meanings and Origins of ‘P’s and Q’s.’” Wordhistories.net, 21 June 2016.

Image credit: TEACH Rwanda, 2019. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

buck (dollar)

January 7, 2022

US Federal Reserve bank notes in denominations from one to one hundred dollars

7 January 2022

Buck is slang for a dollar. Originally, it applied to the US dollar, but has since been adopted as a slang term for other currencies that denominate in dollars, such as the Australian and New Zealand dollars. Buck is short for buckskin, as animal hides were used as currency along the American frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Evidence of the use of deer hides as currency can be seen in the account of William Biggs, who used them to negotiate a ransom when he was taken prisoner by the Kiikaapoa people in 1788 in what is now Indiana:

My friend McCauslin then inquired of them if they had agreed to sell me; they told him they would. McCauslin then sent for the interpreter, and the Indians asked one hundred buckskins for me in merchandize. The interpreter asked me if I would give it? I told them I would. The Indians then went to the traders’ houses to receive their pay. They took but seventy bucks’ worth of merchandize at that time.
[...]
The Indians then went and took their thirty dollars of balance and thirty more and went off home. I then owed the traders that advanced the goods for me one hundred and thirty buckskins for my ransom, which they considered equal to $260 in silver.

And there is this receipt from the Continental Army in 1779 for supplies purchased in what is now northeastern Ohio:

I do certify, that I am indebted to the bearer, Captain Johnny, seven bucks and one doe, for the use of the states, this 12th April, 1779. Signed Samuel Sample, assistant quarter master. The above is due to him for pork, for the use of the garrison at Fort Laurens.
(Signed) JOHN GIBSON, Colonel.

And there is this detailed description of trade with Indigenous people in Mount Vernon, Ohio, c.1815:

After smoking and talking awhile together, one only at a time arose, went to the counter, and, taking up a yard stick, pointed to the first article he desired, and inquired the price. The questions were in this manner: “how many buckskins for a shirt pattern?” or “cloth for leggings?” &c. According to their skin currency,
A muskrat skin was equal to a quarter of a dollar; a raccoon skin, a third of a dollar; a doe skin, half a dollar, and buck skin, “the almighty dollar.” The Indian, learning the price of an article, payed for it by picking out and handing over the skins, before proceeding to purchase the second, when he repeated the process, and so on through the whole, paying for every thing as he went on, and never waiting for that purpose until he had finished. While the first Indian was trading, the others looked uninterruptedly on, and when he was through, another took his place, and so on, in rotation, until all had traded. No one desired to trade before his turn, and all observed a proper decorum, and never attempted to “beat down,” but, if dissatisfied with the price, passed on to the next article. They were cautious not to trade while intoxicated; but usually preserved some of their skins to buy liquor, and end their visit with a frolic.

These early uses are all animal hides used as currency and as units of accounting, not as items for barter. These are instances of hides as monetary currency.

We finally see buck being used as slang for a dollar by 1856. From Sacramento, California’s Daily Democratic State Journal of 3 July 1856:

Bernard, assault and battery upon Wm. Croft; mulcted in the sum of twenty bucks; Wm. Croft standing as compared with Bernard, in a sort of vice versa position—paid costs, and departed in disgust.

Evidently, William Croft had some sort of legal responsibility for Bernard, so he had to pay Bernard’s fine even though he was the victim of the assault. No wonder he was disgusted.

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Sources:

Biggs, William. Narrative of the Captivity of William Biggs Among the Kickapoo Indians in Illinois in 1788. New York: C.F. Heartman, 1922, 32–33. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. buck, n.3.

Hildreth, Samuel Prescott. Pioneer History. Cincinnati: H.W. Derby, 1848, 138. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Howe, Henry. Historical Collections of Ohio. Cincinnati: E. Morgan, 1851, 274. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. buck, n.8.

“Recorder’s Court.” Daily Democratic State Journal (Sacramento, California), 3 July 1856, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: US Federal Reserve, 2018. Public domain image.

uncle

January 6, 2022

6 January 2022

The slang Americanism say uncle is an odd phrase. It means to submit, to surrender, to give in, but why uncle is used in the phrase seemingly makes no sense. The phrase is frequently heard on playgrounds, where one child holds another down until they say uncle. Often when researching the origin of slang, the metaphor underlying the term in question cannot be determined for certain. But say uncle is a case where we have a trail of evidence for where it comes from and how it transitioned from the specific context of a joke to a generalized slang phrase.

An uncle is the brother or brother-in-law of one of your parents. The word was borrowed into English from Anglo-Norman French, where it was a clipping of the Latin avunculus. The Old English terms for an uncle subsequently fell out of use. These Old English words were eam, a maternal uncle, and fædera, a paternal uncle. (Eam, in the form eme, survived in Scots and northern English dialects into the nineteenth century, although it lost the maternal distinction along the way.)

The word uncle is recorded in Anglo-Norman in the early twelfth century, and it appears in Middle English by 1300 in the South-English Legendary in the life of Saint Edward:

His broþur, þe king Aþeldred : guod man was i-nouȝ;
Edward was is sone i-hote : þat to alle guodnesse drouȝ,
Þat king was sethþe aftur him : and heiȝ halewe in heouene is,
I-cleoped seint Edward aftur is vncle : at West-Munstre he lijth, i-wis.
(His brother, the King Athelred [the Unready], was very much a good man; Edward was called his sone, that all the goodness was drawn to him. Afterward, Aþelred was king after him, and is a high saint in heaven. Saint Edward is named after his uncle, and I know he is buried at Westminster.)

Uncle’s etymology, therefore, is quite simple and straightforward. A bit boring, even. But that of the Americanism say/cry uncle is neither. The phrase say uncle stems from a joke that is first recorded in Dublin’s Weekly Irish Times on 20 June 1891:

A gentleman was boasting that his parrot would repeat anything he told him. For example, he told him several times, before some friends, to say “Uncle,” but the parrot would not repeat it. In anger he seized the bird, and half-twisting its neck, said: “Say ‘Uncle,’ you beggar,” and threw him into a fowlpen, in which he had ten prize fowls. Shortly afterwards, thinking perhaps he had killed the parrot, he went to the pen. To his surprise he found nine of the fowls dead on the floor, with their necks wrung, and the parrot standing on the tenth twisting his neck and screaming: “Say ‘Uncle,’ you beggar.”

Why uncle was used in the joke is probably an arbitrary choice, but uncle is a term of respect given to an older, male relative or family friend and the man may have been trying to teach the parrot to address him as such.

In any case, the joke was an enormously popular one, appearing in a London paper on 25 September 1891, and making it as far as an Iowa paper by 9 October. And it was retold countless times in US newspapers over the next several decades.

1903 comic strip titled “Simon Finds the Telephone Useful.” A description is in the text below.

We start to see the transition from joke to phrase in a cartoon that appears in the Atlanta Journal on 1 February 1903. In the cartoon, titled “Simon Finds the Telephone Useful,” a boy is teaching his parrot to talk when the telephone rings. The caller is a shopkeeper who wants payment for the crackers the boy bought, presumably to train the parrot. The boy puts the parrot on the phone, and the bird starts insulting the shopkeeper, calling him a “liar” and other epithets. Angered the shopkeeper arrives at the boy’s house, where the door is answered by the boy’s father. In the final frame, we see the shopkeeper beating the father with a club while the boy and parrot look on. The parrot says, “make him say uncle.” Clearly, this is a reference to the well-known joke, but the context is different and say uncle is on its way to becoming a slang phrase.

And we see the slang phrase in the sense of agreeing to submit within a decade. The Trenton Evening Times of 27 March 1912 has this account of a basketball game between the Trenton team and Philadelphia’s Jasper Jewels:

Just as soon as Referee Baetzel slipped the ball into play it was a foregone conclusion that Jasper was not as fast as they believe them to be down in Philadelphia. The Trenton players simply went after the Jewels and made “’em say uncle.”

It is likely that say uncle was in widespread oral use well before this 1912 date. Slang terms such as this one usually take some time to move from oral use into print publications.

There is a belief, touted by some respectable sources (including the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang), that say uncle is a folk etymology from the Irish anacol, meaning an act of protection, quarter. Anacol is a verbal noun from aingid, meaning to protect. This idea was first put forward in the journal American Speech in 1976, but it is speculation with essentially no evidence to support it. Besides the documented path of the phrase’s development in North America, say uncle is clearly an Americanism, not generally found in Ireland or Britain. Nor are there any recorded instances of say anacol or anything similar that would lend credence to the idea of a folk etymology. The original joke may have gotten its start in Ireland, but it had nothing to do with anacol and did not develop into a stock phrase until it had crossed the ocean.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. uncle.

“Edward.” The Early South-English Legendary. Carl Horstmann, ed. Early English Text Society, London: N. Trübner, 1887. Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud 108, fol. 41r–v.

“Got Square on the Hens.” Iowa Citizen (Iowa City, Iowa), 9 October 1891, 16. Historical Iowa City Newspapers, Iowa City Public Library.

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

“Humorous Gatherings.” Every Week (London), 25 September 1891, 256. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

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

Millward, Celia M. “Two Irish Loans in English.” American Speech, 51.3/4, Autumn/Winter 1976, 281–82. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, modified September 2021, s.v. uncle, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. eme, n.

“Simon Finds the Telephone Useful.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 1 February 1903, 37. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Trenton Made Jasper Look Like Bad Money.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 27 March 1912, 13. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Weekly Irish Times (Dublin), 20 June 1891, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.