Murphy's Law

January 14, 2022

14 January 2022

Murphy’s Law is a jocular principle that is commonly stated as “if anything can go wrong, it will.” The so-called law is often said to have been created by Captain Edward A. Murphy, an engineer at Muroc Army Airfield (known today as Edwards Air Force Base) in 1949. But Captain Murphy was not the originator of the principle or phrasing—those were in use long before 1949. Captain Murphy may have bequeathed his name to the law, but even that is in doubt.

The principle stated by Murphy’s Law dates to ancient times. The Roman playwright Plautus (c.254–184 BCE) penned words to that effect in his play Mostellaria:

insperata accidunt magis saepe quam quae speres
(Things you don’t hope for happen more often than things you do hope for.)

A statement closer to the usual wording of Murphy’s Law today appears in the Economist on 22 March 1862 in a passage referring to how lawyers view the prospects of a business venture’s success:

But the lawyer does not see the whole of mercantile life. He sees only the failures. There is a “hitch,” as he calls it, in every case which comes before him. His instinct, therefore, is that business as a rule fails,—that what can go wrong will go wrong,—that every opening for fraud will be filled with fraud,—that a merely moral obligation is, as Lord Wensleydale concisely observed, “nothing,”—that all who can cheat will cheat, and all who do not cheat cannot cheat.

And fifteen years later the principle was being applied to steamships. From an article by Alfred Holt in the 1877–78 Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers:

It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later, so it is not to be wondered that owners prefer the safe to the scientific. It is also found that it is almost as bad to have too many parts as too few; that arrangements which are for exceptional and occasional use are rarely available when wanted, and have the disadvantage of requiring additional care. Their very presence, too, seems in effect to indispose the engineer to attend to essentials. Sufficient stress can hardly be laid on the advantages of simplicity. The human factor cannot be safely neglected in planning machinery. If attention is to be obtained, the engine must be such that the engineer will be disposed to attend to it.

In June 1908, British magician Nevil Maskelyne stated the principle thusly in the magazine Magic Circular:

It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any special occasion, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

The next year, one of Maskelyne’s stage partners, David Devant, wrote the following:

The conjurer does not really know a trick thoroughly until everything that can possibly go wrong with it has gone wrong, and unfortunately this knowledge can be acquired only by experience in front of audiences.

And there is this, which appeared in an article about boat engines in the magazine Country Life on 6 April 1929:

For my own part, I always have the water pump overhauled before making any attempt to start the engine, assuming with cautious pessimism that what can go wrong will do so, and that it is desirable to have such things rectified at the beginning.

So, the general principle articulated by Murphy’s Law was well established in many fields of endeavor by the early twentieth century. But where does Murphy come in? This question leads us to the tale of Captain Edward A. Murphy. He was an engineer working on experiments to test the effects of high-g deceleration on the human body, tests supervised by Colonel John Stapp, MD. Basically, test subjects, including Stapp, rode a rocket sled that was rapidly decelerated. Murphy was responsible for the sensors on the body’s harness that recorded test data. On one test in 1949, the sensors failed to record data, and Murphy discovered that one of the technicians had wired them incorrectly. According to the story, this mistake led Murphy to observe that if there was a wrong way to do it, that technician would do it that way. Allegedly, at a subsequent press conference—Stapp’s tests were widely reported by the media—one of the supervisors, in some accounts Stapp himself, credited Murphy with coming up with the principle. But if this story about the press conference is true, no researcher has found any evidence of a press conference where Stapp or a member of his team made a reference to Murphy’s Law or even to the general principle.

The earliest published reference to Murphy’s Law being uttered by Stapp or one of his team is in Lloyd Mallan’s 1955 Men, Rockets and Space Rats:

Major Simons shakes his head. He remembers Colonel Stapp’s favorite takeoff on sober scientific laws—Murphy’s Law, Stapp calls it—“Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong.”

It seems likely that Stapp’s team did indeed jokingly refer to the principle as Murphy’s Law. The question is whether Captain Murphy gave his name to the already established principle, or whether it was already called being referred to as Murphy’s Law and the captain coincidentally bearing the same name was part of the joke. We don’t have any pre-1949 instances of Murphy’s Law, so that gives credence to the idea that the name originated with the captain. But the first recorded uses of the phrase come shortly afterward and are in fields far removed from the test-bed at Muroc/Edwards.

The first absolutely certain instance of Murphy’s Law is in an paper by Anne Roe in the May 1951 issue of Genetic Psychology Monographs. Rowe records this story told by a physicist. The story is being related in the context of being shown an image of two people and being asked to tell a story about it. On seeing the picture, the physicist responded:

Oh, my God. There was once an artist who yearned to be a great architect and to build churches and other monuments which would be a true decoration to the Mediterranean civilization in which he lived. As he studied more and more he became interested in the details of the great edifices which he had planned to erect and finally discovered that these meant more to him than the cold architectural drawings in which he had been originally most interested. He ended up by designing statutes of saints who were of a particular nature which stood in the corners of the churches built to his plan by someone else and gradually became covered with the dust which was to the best interests of the people who came there. As for himself he realized that this was the inexorable working of the second law of thermodynamics which stated Murphy’s law “If anything can go wrong it will.” I always liked Murphy’s law, I was told that by an architect.

The physicist’s framing of Murphy’s Law as a corollary to the second law of thermodynamics hints at a different origin than Stapp’s team at Muroc/Edwards. Roe does not give the dates when her data was collected, but given the size of the study, it was likely collected over the course of a year or more. The 8 February 1951 date of submission of the monograph to the journal indicates that it was being written in 1950, which would push the probable date of data collection to 1949, around the time Captain Murphy was working on Stapp’s team. While the transfer of the phrase from Stapp’s team to the physicist in Roe’s study cannot be ruled out, the dates and the physicist’s attribution of the term to an architect make it unlikely. The evidence in Roe’s paper indicates that the phrase Murphy’s Law was already in use in 1949 when the engineers at Muroc/Edwards joked about Captain Murphy.

Roe also uses the phrase several times in a 1952 book about her study, but the name Murphy’s Law starts frequently appearing in print in 1956. By that year it had been adopted as a mantra by the military aviation safety community. We get this from the MATS Flyer of January 1956:

MURPHY’S LAW
“If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way.” (Aviation Mechanics Bulletin)

I have been unable to locate the Aviation Mechanics Bulletin referred to here.

The first use of the phrase in the mainstream media is from the same month. From an article on aircraft safety in the New York Times of 22 January 1956:

Flight safety engineers, struggling with problems that multiply daily with mass air transportation, quote a tenet known simply as Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

And the US Navy’s aviation safety magazine, Approach, starts a regular column titled Murphy’s Law. From the April 1956 issue:

Murphy’s Law: “If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way.”—Flight Safety Foundation Aviation Mechanic’s Bulletin.

And from the November 1956 issue, which also calls a mistake a Murphy or a Murphy factor:

MURPHY’S LAW
*If an aircraft part can be installed incorrectly, someone will install it that way.
MURPHY IN J65 ENGINE FUEL CONTROL
The pilot of an A4D-1 was at 1000 feet when an unknown pilot of another aircraft in the air broadcast that flames were visible around the aft section of the A4D’s fuselage. The A4D pilot promptly shut down the engine and executed a landing on an airfield.
A Murphy factor in the Model TJ-L2 fuel control of the aircraft’s J65 engine was determined to have caused this in-flight fire. The O-ring seal, part number R33-P-1550-3232, was put against the cover face instead of in the machined groove located 1/4-inch from the inner end of the cap for the packing O-ring.
Cases of in-flight fires involving this Murphy have also been reported in J-65-equipped FJ-3 and -4 model aircraft.

And in the 1962 book Into Orbit, written by the seven Mercury astronauts, John Glenn credits this naval Murphy as the progenitor of the phrase:

We blamed human errors like this on what aviation engineers call “Murphy’s Law.” “Murphy” was a fictitious character who appeared in a series of educational cartoons put out by the U.S. Navy to stress aviation safety among its maintenance crews. In the cartoons, Murphy was a careless, all-thumbs mechanic who was prone to make such mistakes as installing a propeller backwards or forgetting to tighten a bolt. He finally became such an institution that someone thought up a principle of human error called Murphy’s Law. It went like this: “Any part that can be installed wrongly will be installed wrongly at some point by someone.”

The column’s header in Approach did include a drawing of a person, presumably the eponymous Murphy, and this may be the “cartoon” that Glenn, a Marine aviator and undoubtedly a reader of Approach, refers to. But it’s a stretch to call the column a cartoon. The column consists of text and photos. There may be a cartoon version, but if so, I haven’t found it.

What can we glean from all this? First, the principle behind Murphy’s Law existed long before Captain Edward Murphy. It is possible that the good captain lent his name to the principle, but there is indirect evidence that the term Murphy’s Law was already in use before the captain came along.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Calkins, Ken. “Hardy Repellent.” The MATS Flyer, January 1956, Military Air Transport Service, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Devant, David. Tricks for Everyone: Clever Conjuring with Common Objects (1909). London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1910, 60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Glenn, John. “Glitches in Time Save Trouble.” Into Orbit. John Glenn, et al. London: Cassell, 1962, 85–86.

Goranson, Stephen. “‘Murphy’s Law’ Antedating 1943.” ADS-L, 6 October 2009.

———. “Murphy’s-Law-ish-Text, 1877–78.” ADS-L, 10 October 2007.

Holt, Alfred. “Review of the Progress of Steam Shipping During the Last Quarter of a Century.” Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 51.1, 1877–78, 8. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Law Versus Commerce.” The Economist (London), 22 March 1862, 312. Gale Primary Sources: The Economist.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2003, modified September 2021, s.v. Murphy’s Law, n.

Mallan, Lloyd. Men, Rockets and Space Rats. New York: Julian Messner, 1955, 188.

Matthews, Robert A.J. “The Science of Murphy’s Law.” Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 70, 1999, 75–95.

“Murphy’s Law.” Approach, 1.10, April 1956, US Naval Aviation Safety Center, 39. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. Approach, 2.5, November 1956, US Naval Aviation Safety Center, 39. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Plautus. “Mostellaria, or the Ghost.” Plautus: The Merchant, the Braggart Soldier, the Ghost, the Persian. Wolfgang de Melo, ed. and trans. Loeb Classical Library 163. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, 1.3, line 198, 334–35.

Porterfield, Byron. “Air Safety Goal of L.I. Seminars.” New York Times, 22 January 1956, 60. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Roe, Anne. The Making of a Scientist. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952, 46, 214, 224.

———. “A Psychological Study of Physical Scientists.” Genetic Psychology Monographs, 43.2, May 1951, 204.

Sabel, William O. Letter, 26 March 1943. Seeds of Hope: An Engineer’s World War II Letters. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1999, 99–100. The phrase Murphy’s Law appears in this book’s transcription of a 1943 letter, but this was an editorial addition in 1999 that does not appear in the original 1943 letter.

Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Murphy’s Law’ Proverb.” ADS-L, 8 November 2019.

———. “Modern Proverbs 100.” The New Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale UP, 2021, 565.

W.H.J. “Waking-Up the Boat Engine.” Country Life (Bath, England), 6 April 1929, xlviii–l. ProQuest.

Image credit: unknown artist, 1956, US Navy. Public domain image.

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.

Discuss this post

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.

Discuss this post

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.

Discuss this post

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.