Indiana

January 27, 2022

27 January 2022

The state of Indiana is named, generically, for the Indigenous people of North America, but obviously the name does not acknowledge the specific Indigenous peoples who have lived and are still living on that land. The land was the home to the Mississipian peoples (1000–1500 C.E.), and at the time of European contact the Shawnee, Miami, and Illini peoples, among others, were living there. Other peoples who have lived in what is now the state of Indiana since European contact have included the Kickapoo, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Wea, Piankashaw, Chippewa, Delaware, Wyandot, Kaskaskia, and Eel River tribes.

Indiana first appears in English as a woman’s name. For instance, it appears as the name of a character in Richard Steele’s 1722 play The Conscious Lovers. This use of a person’s name, however, is more likely a reference to colonial India than to the people of North America.

When the name was first applied as a name of a territory, it was not to what now constitutes the state of Indiana, but to a region of some 5,000 square miles in what is now West Virginia. The territory was ceded by the Iroquois Confederacy to a Philadelphia trading company in 1768 as compensation for goods seized from them in a 1763 raid. In 1776, the state of Virginia laid claim to this territory, and in a long-running legal battle that concluded in 1798, Virginia secured the territory for itself and discarded the name Indiana.

The name was revived in 1800 when the Northwest Territory of the United States was divided and the name given to the western portion, the eastern portion being Ohio. From the 1800 Act to Divide the Territory of the United States North-West of the Ohio, into Two Separate Governments:

That from and after the fourth day of July next, all that part of the territory of the United States north west of the Ohio river, which lies to the westward of a line beginning at the Ohio, opposite to the mouth of Kentucky river, and running thence to Fort Recovery, and thence north until it shall intersect the territorial line between the United States and Canada, shall, for the purposes of temporary government, constitute a separate territory, and be called the INDIANA Territory.

Subsequently, the Indiana Territory was reduced in size when the Michigan and Illinois Territories were separated from it. Indiana became the nineteenth state in 1816. Residents of the state are popularly known as Hoosiers, a mysterious name with no known etymological connection to the name Indiana.

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Sources:

American Indian Center of Indiana. Accessed 10 December 2021. http://www.americanindiancenter.org/info.php?pnum=10

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

Hodgin, Cyrus W. The Naming of Indiana. Papers of the Wayne County, Indiana Historical Society, 1.1. Richmond, Indiana: Nicolson Printing, 1903, 6–10. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, modified March 2019, s.v. Indiana, n.

United States Senate. Amendment to An Act to Divide the Territory of the United States North-West of the Ohio, into Two Separate Governments (H.R. 73, 6th Congress). 21 April 1800.

Victor, Benjamin. An Epistle to Sir Richard Steele, on his Play, Call’d, the Conscious Lovers. London: W. Chetwood, et al. 1722. 15. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Abraham Bradley, Jr., 1804. Library of Congress.

peanut / peanut gallery

January 26, 2022

The peanut gallery from the Howdy Doody television show (1947–60). A black and white photo of approximately 40 children seated in a grandstand labeled with a sign reading “Peanut Gallery.” A man in a stylized cowboy costume squats in front. — The *peanut gallery* from the *Howdy Doody* television show (1947–60). A black and white photo of approximately 40 children seated in a grandstand labeled with a sign reading “Peanut Gallery.” A man in a stylized cowboy costume, Buffalo Bob Smith, squats in front of them.

26 January 2022

A peanut is the seed of the legume Arachis hypogaea. The name is a compound of pea + nut, presumably because it resembles the seed pod of the pea, but the seed itself is harder, like a nut. (Botanically, it’s not technically a nut.) The plant is native to South America but is commercially grown in warmer climes throughout the globe. In addition to being the name of the legume, peanut has developed a slang sense for things and people who are physically small or socially insignificant, such as children.

The name peanut dates to the early nineteenth century, although there is at least one late eighteenth century use of the word to refer to the hickory nut. The hickory nut usage is from Henry Wansey’s 1796 Journal of an Excursion to the United States:

I brought from the United States with me, of live animals, two kinds of tortoises, and a beautiful flying squirrel; of shrubs and plants, rhododendrons, martegon lillies, tulip trees, acacias, Virginia cypresses, magnolia glaucus, sugar maple trees, &c. Of nuts, hiccory and chinquopin, or pea nuts. The latter, I find, is very common in China, as a native Chinese told me, when dining at my house, with two gentlemen of Lord Macartney’s suite, some of those nuts being on table.

The earliest known use of peanut to refer to the legume is by Washington Irving in one of the letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, first published in the New York Morning Chronicle of 1 December 1802:

The curtain rose—out walked the Queen with great majesty; she answered my ideas—she was dressed well, she looked well, and she acted well. The Queen was followed by a pretty gentleman, who, from his winking and grinning, I took to be the court fool; I soon found out my mistake. He was a courtier “high in trust,” and either general, colonel, or something of martial dignity. They talked for some time, though I could not understand the drift of their discourse, so I amused myself with eating pea-nuts.

Within a few decades, however, peanut had acquired an adjectival use meaning small, insignificant, or foolish. From William Dunlap’s 1836 Thirty Years Ago; or the Memoirs of a Water Drinker, in which the character Spiff describes an encounter with some hecklers in a theater where his wife is performing as Lady Macbeth:

“Two blackguards came into the Shakespeare box and disturbed the audience while Mrs. Spiffard was in one of her best scenes; and the scoundrels made use of insolent language respecting her—her person—her acting—and I think I can appeal to any one in favour of her Lady Macbeth at all times.”
[...]
“But you, Spiff, when they insulted Mrs. Spiffard?—What said you” asked the manager.
“‘This may be sport,” said I, ‘to you, but it is a serious injury—a wanton outrage upon the feelings of the audience and the actor or actress.’”
[...]
“Well. What said they.”
“They look’d at each other, and then at me, as much to say, ‘who are you?’—I answered that look——”
“With a look?”
“‘I am that lady’s husband.’ They look’d at each other again—appeared to feel like fools by quitting their places, for they were standing on the seats of the box, and soon after they shuffled off, as well as they could.”
“And left you ‘cock of the walk,’ as Millstone says.”
“We ought all to thank you,” said Cooper, “they were your pea-nut fellows, I suppose.”

Within a few decades this adjective meaning insignificant had morphed into a noun. From an 1864 account by Mark Twain:

I observe that that young officer of the Pacific squadron—the one with his nostrils turned up like port-holes—has become a great favorite with half the mothers in the house, by imparting to them much useful information concerning the manner of doctoring children among the South American savages. His brother is a brigadier in the Navy. The drab-complexioned youth with the Solferino mustache has corralled the other half with the Japanese treatment.—The more I think of it, the more I admire it. Now, I am no peanut. I have an idea that I could invent some little remedies that would stir up a commotion among these women, if I chose to try. I always had a good general notion of physic, I believe. It is one of my natural gifts, too, for I have never studied a single day under a regular physician. I will jot down a few items here, just to see how likely I am to succeed.

This nominal use to mean a small or insignificant person would evolve into a sense of peanut meaning a child, a sense that would often be used affectionately. This last is, perhaps, most famously exemplified by Charles Schulz’s long-running comic strip Peanuts.

And around the same time that Twain was writing the above piece, the term peanut gallery came into use, referring to the cheap seats in a theater, usually the highest balcony. Because the seats were inexpensive, they were often occupied by a rowdy and boisterous crowd. In the American South, however, peanut gallery referred to the segregated seats occupied by Blacks. Here is an 1867 example from the New Orleans Times Picayune in a review of a performance by blackface minstrels:

It is useless for us to repeat our praises of Johnny Thompson, Billy Reeves, and others of the company, as negro delineators; they “out Herod Herod,” and put the darkies in the “peanut gallery” fairly to the blush.

An early, non-racialized use of peanut gallery can be found the Placerville, California Mountain Democrat of 10 June 1876. Republican senator and presidential candidate James G. Blaine had been accused of selling worthless land to the Union Pacific Railroad, a laundering of bribe money. This passage details Blaine’s attempt to divert attention away from the scandal. Blaine would lose the nomination fight to Rutherford B. Hayes:

The emergency demanded a bold and prompt diversion. So this modern Scipio for the second time this session “carried the war into Africa,” sprang into the House with his bundle of letters, read them in an excited manner to an excited audience, giving plausible explanations as he went along, winding up with a savage assault upon J. Proctor Knott, Democratic Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. There was a great deal of Beecherism in all this. It was bold, brilliant, adroit, audacious. As a bid for applause from the political pit and peanut gallery it was a masterpiece.

Some sources contend that peanut gallery comes from the practice of people in the cheap seats eating peanuts, but it is more likely that it is simply an outgrowth of the small, insignificant sense. Those in the cheap seats, whether they be Black people; children; or boisterous, white adults didn’t matter.

And for an extensive review of the names for the peanut in different languages, see the Polyglot Vegetarian: “Peanut” and “Peanut, Continued.”

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Sources:

Dunlap, William. Thirty Years Ago; or the Memoirs of a Water Drinker, vol. 2 of 2. New York: Bancroft and Holley, 1836, 25.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. peanut, n., peanut, adj.

Irving, Washington. “Letter 2” (1 December 1802). Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle. New York: William H. Clayton, 1824, 11–12. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“The Modern Scipio.” Mountain Democrat (Placerville, California), 10 June 1876, 2. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2005, modified December 2021, s.v. peanut, n. and adj.

Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 16 January 1867, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens). “Those Blasted Children” (1864). Mark Twain’s San Francisco, Bernard Taper, ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963, 31. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wansey, Henry. The Journal of an Excursion to the United States of North America in the Summer of 1794. Salisbury: J. Easton, 1796, 250. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo credit. Unknown photographer, 1940s–50s, NBC Television. Public domain image in the United States as it was published in the United States between 1926–77 without a copyright notice.

Mississippi

January 25, 2022

25 January 2022

(Updated 28 January: added Ottawa etymology and Goddard citation.)

Detail of a 1673 map by Jacques Marquette showing the Mitchisipi River. A hand-drawn map of a large river showing Indigenous settlements on both banks. — Detail of a 1673 map by Jacques Marquette showing the *Mitchisipi River*. A hand-drawn map of a large river showing Indigenous settlements on both banks.

The state of Mississippi has an Indigenous name, but not one from a language of the peoples who lived there at the time of European contact. Those people primarily spoke Muskogean languages, while the name Mississippi is from the Algonquian language group, most likely from the Ottawa missi-si·pi (large river). The state takes its name from the Mississippi river, which forms its western border. The name of the river entered into European languages via French explorers far to the north of what is now the state, near the river’s headwaters, hence the belief that it comes from Ottawa.

The name Mississippi, for the river, appears as Mitchisipi in a 1673 map by Jacques Marquette. It makes its way into English by 1698 in a translation of Henri de Tonti’s Account of Monsieur de la Salle’s Last Expedition and Discoveries in North America:

This Bay of Puans is formed by an overflowing of the Lake of the Illinois, occasion’d by a great River, which falls into this Lake. This River call’d Onisconcing comes from another Lake about 100 Leagues distant; from which comes another River, which falls into the Mississipi; and therefore this Lake may be lookt upon as a Communication between Canada and the Gulph of Mexico, as one may see by the Map.

The colonial masters of the region that is now the state of Mississippi changed several times over the course of the eighteenth century. Originally claimed by France, the region was ceded to Britain from France following the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War). It was subsequently ceded to the United States following the American Revolution, which organized the Mississippi Territory in 1798, consisting of what is now the states of Mississippi and Alabama. The western half of the territory was admitted to the union in 1817 under the name Mississippi, and the eastern half was redesignated Alabama.

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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.

Goddard, Ives. “Mississippi.” Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of America, Newsletter 25.4, January 2007, 12–13. Archive.org.

Marquette, Jacques. Map of the New Discovery Made by the Jesuit Fathers in 1672. 1673. Library of Congress.

Tonti, Henri de. An Account of Monsieur de la Salle’s Last Expedition and Discoveries in North America. London: J. Tonson, et al. 1698, 24. Early English Books Online.

Image credit: Marquette, Jacques. Map of the New Discovery Made by the Jesuit Fathers in 1672. 1673. Library of Congress. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

pandemonium

January 24, 2022

24 January 2022

In present-day usage, pandemonium is a place of confusion and chaos. But the word was coined by John Milton in his 1667 Paradise Lost, and he used the word as the name of the capital of hell. Milton combined the prefix pan- (whole of, universality), from the Greek παν-, with the Latin daemonium, demon or spirit. Therefore, pandemonium is literally the place of all demons. The use of pan- as a combining form in English was rare before the nineteenth century, so Milton’s use was unusual and distinctive, but not unprecedented. From Paradise Lost 1.175–57:

Mean while the winged Haralds by command
Of Sovran power, with awful Ceremony
And Trumpets sound throughout the Host proclaim
A solemn Councel forthwith to be held
At Pandæmonium, the high Capitol
Of Satan and his Peers

Milton used pandemonium to refer to a specific palace or citadel within hell, but by the next century the word was being used as a synonym for hell itself. From the Earl of Chesterfield’s “Old England” of 1743:

“This Jeffrey Broadbottom, this constitutional journal, is certainly levelled at us,” says a conscious sullen apostate to his fallen brethren in the Pandæmonium.

And around the same time, pandemonium starts being used with an extended meaning of a place of evil or iniquity. There is this 1755 anonymous piece, titled M—Ckl—n’s Answer to Tully that refers to a theater audience as a pandemonium, but it is an extended use of Milton’s term, the following passage is preceded by a quotation from Paradise Lost and ends with a reference to the poem:

But as I observed before, Envy must always—always detract from that Joy which otherways would be too much to bear, when arising from the Applause of the Learned and the Great. I complained of this Usage, but a Gentleman observed that as I had at the Beginning call’d myself the Grand Devil and waggishly term’d the Audience my Pandæmonium, a Hiss was the most proper Token of Applause; as Milton himself assures us, when the Devil had finish’d, the others signified their Applause by a Hiss.

In 1779, Henry Swinburne uses pandemonium in a travel narrative without any explicit reference to Milton to describe the country of Spain:

Were I to draw the picture of the Spaniards from the manyfold sketches traced by their countrymen, every province in the kingdom would in its turn appear a Paradise, and a Pandæmonium, a seat of holy spirts, and a receptacle of malicious devils; the most contradictory accounts, enforced by the most positive asseverations, have been repeatedly given me of the same places.

And in the nineteenth century we see the sense of pandemonium meaning confusion or chaos. This passage, from Robert Montgomery’s 1827 satire The Age Reviewed, describes men competing for the affections of young women, while their teams and coaches, awaiting them outside, are in a chaotic traffic jam:

Now from the Op’ra’s widened portals stream
A shiv’ring concourse,—wide the torches gleam,—
And fling cadav’rous hues upon each face,
Where palled Delight has left her pale-worn trace;
Perturbed mark, the blinking chap’rons guard,
Wrapt in her gather’d silks—their dainty ward;
While flutt’ring near, gallants obtrusive try
To read the twinkling promise of her eye:
Within the crush-room fretful throngs parade,
And lisping puppies quizz each well-laced maid;
Some round the fire-place chafe their chilly hands,
Smooth their wild locks, and fold their silken bands:
Here, too, the rival flirt with whispers loud,
Hung on a suitor’s arm, attracts the crowd;
While borne with crutches to the creaking door,
The snarling cuckolds for their cars implore:
Without,—a Pandemonium seems to sound,
Where busy foot-falls beat along the ground;
The bouncing coachman’s sky-ascending bawl,
And loud-mouthed lacquies elbowing through all,—
The cracking stones beneath each fire-eyed steed,
All eager pawing till the course is freed,
Commingled—greet the concourse hastening home,
To dream of neat-legg’d eunuchs fresh from Rome!

One can find sources that claim that pandemonium derives from the Greek god Pan, but that is not the case.

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Sources:

Chesterfield, Earl of (Philip Dormer Stanhope). “Old England, Or the Constitutional Journal” (19 February 1743). Miscellaneous Works, vol. 1 of 2. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1777, 116. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. daemonium. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. daemonium, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

M—Ckl—n’s Answer to Tully. London: S. Stonehouse, 1755, 8–9. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Milton, John. Paradise Lost (1667). The Poetical Works of John Milton, vol. 1. Helen Darbishire, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963, 1.752–57. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

Montgomery, Robert. The Age Reviewed: A Satire. London: William Carpenter, 1827, 303–04. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, modified March 2021, s.v. pandemonium, n., pan-, comb. form.

Swinburne, Henry. Travels Through Spain. London: P. Elmsly, 1779, 367. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: John Martin, 1841. Louvre Museum. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of public domain work.

Illinois

January 21, 2022

21 January 2022

Detail of a 1681 map of North America showing the Great Lakes, including Lake Illinois (a.k.a., Lake Michigan) and an Illinois village.

The Illinois people were an informal confederation of a dozen or so Algonquian tribes who lived in the Mississippi Valley, stretching from present-day Michigan to Arkansas, including what is now the state of Illinois. The tribes included the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Peoria, and Tamaroa, among others. Their name for themselves is irenweewa (he who speaks normally). In Ojibwa, that name is rendered as ilinwe, or in the plural ilenwek.

The French, who in the late seventeenth century made contact with the Ojibwa, rendered the -we ending as ‑ois, using the conventions of seventeenth-century French spelling to make it Illinois. Subsequent to European contact, the Illinois people were decimated by disease, war, and forced relocation. Today, the primary organization of the people is the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.

The name Illinois appears in English by the end of the seventeenth century. This translation of an anonymous account of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s expeditions is from 1698 and mentions the Illinois people:

M. la Salle had given orders for Building a new Ship or great Bark, and our Men workt about it with all the diligence that the Season of the Year could permit; but the cold was so excessive, that not only Rivers, but even those vast Lakes were frozen all over, insomuch that they lookd like a Plain pav'd with fine polish'd Marble. We traded in the mean time with the Natives, and got a great number of Furrs; but several things being wanting to continue our Voyage, this couragious Gentleman resolv'd to return by Land to Fort Frontenac, and come back again in the Spring with a new supply of Ammunition and Merchandise, to trade with the Nations he intended to visit. He sent likewise fifteen Men further into the Country, with orders to endeavour to find out the Illinois, and left his Fort of Niagara, and fifteen Men under my command. One of the Recollects contineud [sic] with us.

And Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America gives an incorrect etymology for the name Illinois, claiming it meant “accomplished men.” This etymology has been thoroughly discounted, but it was accepted as correct for several centuries, and one will often still see it on websites and in popular press accounts of the word’s origin. From the 1698 English translation of Hennepin’s work:

The Lake Illinois, in the Natives Language, signifies the Lake of Men; for the word Illinois signifies a Man of full Age in the vigour of his Strength. It lies to the West of the Lake Huron toward the North, and is about a Hundred and twenty, or a hundred and thirty Leagues in length, and Forty in breadth, being in circuit about Four hundred Leagues. It is call'd by the Miamis, Mischigonong, that is, The Great Lake. It extends it self from North to South, and falls into the Southern-side of the Lake Huron; and is distant from the upper Lake about Fifteen or Sixteen Leagues, its Source lies near a River which the Iroquois call Hohio, where the River Miamis discharges it self into the same Lake.

The territory that is now the state of Illinois was acquired by the United States from France in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Illinois became a state in 1818.

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Sources:

An Account of Monsieur de la Salle’s Last Expedition and Discoveries in North America. London: J. Tonson, et al., 1698, 20. 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.

Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. London: M. Bentley, et al. 1698, 35. Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2019, modified March 2021, s.v. Illinois, n. and adj.

Image credit: Claude Bernou, 1681. National Library of France. Image from the Library of Congress. Public domain image.